Class 

Copyright lf_ 



f 




\ 



I 



THE COLPORTAGE LIBRARY. Vol. 7. No. 103. October, 1901. 
Monthly. $1.20 per annum. Entered at Chicago Post-office as second- class mail matter, 




Malcolm James McLeod. 



tots 
H 

mmmamsr Chicago: 

The Bible Institute Colportage Association, 
250 La Salle Avenue. 



(Written in 1898) 



A Word from 
Mr. Moody^^e^e 



As I have gone through the country, in my evan- 
gelistic work, I have been surprised to notice the great 
lack of good religious reading matter to be had at a 
price within the reach of the poor as well as the rich. 

Principally, to supply this need, displacing the im- 
pure literature with which the country is flooded, and 
to carry the gospel by means of the printed page to the 
forty millions of people in the United States who never 
go to Church, the Colportage Library was started. 

I want to get an earnest Christian man or woman 
in every village and town, and many in the cities, to 
take up the work with these good books. It is the 
Master's service, and there is financial remuneration 
for any who will engage in it. I shall be glad to have 
the name and address of any person who is willing 
to give a portion or all of their time in this way, 
sent to A. P. FITT, Supt., or myself, 250 La Salle 
Ave., Chicago. 



Yours in the Master's work, 




A REQUEST 

Headers o! the Colportage Library who find our 
books useful in their work, helpful in their influence, and 
desirable for distribution, will confer a great favor by 
mentioning them to their friends and others. There are 
multitudes of people ready to purchase, read, and give 
away volumes like this, when they learn of the Library 
and its contents. Our friends can thus give material aid 
in extending the work of preaching the Gospel in print. 

Many of these books have been the means, in God's 
hand, of converting the sinner, reclaiming the backslider, 
and upbuilding the Christian. Your recommendation 
may result in the saving of souls. 
* Printed lists, showing titles, authors and chapter- 
^ -"Contents, mailed free upon application to A, P. Fitt, 
Supt., 250 La Salle Avenue, Chicago. 



C- Mb 

Heavenly Harmonies 



--BY— 



Malcolm James McLeod. 



With Preface by 

Hon. John V. Farwell. 



Chicago: 

The Bible Institute Colportage Association, 
250 La Salle Avenue. 



THE UBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
TWO COP1E3 Receded 

OCT. 28 1901 

Copyright entry 

y&eft f t>~tqot 

CLASS OL XXc No, 
/ 8" S O L> 

copy a. 



Copyright 1901; by 
The Bible Institute Colpobtage Association; 
Chicago. 



PREFACE: 



Being in Pasadena, California, last winter, I at- 
tended services in Rev. Malcolm James McLeod's 
church, and was so impressed with his sermons that 
I requested copies for publication in order that they 
might have a wider circulation. To me they were 
spiritual poetry in prose, spiritual music in harmony 
with man's inmost needs and God's provisions therefor, 
spiritual philosophy and experience made vocal with 
Christ's gospel of salvation. 

I bespeak for Dr. McLeod's addresses an enlarged 
usefulness, trusting that, as they proclaim the facts of 
sin and salvation, many readers may be transformed 
by the new birth and energized by the Holy Ghost. 

John V. Farwell. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Harmony of the Christian Walk T . . . 9 

Harmony with the Will of God. .7 27 

Harmony of the Work with the Worker. ....... 43 

Harmony with Environment, 54 

Harmony through Experience 71 

Harmony with the Christ-life.^. ? 83 

Harmony with the Christ-pity . T , . 99 

Harmony and Communion of Public Worship. . . 112 



CHAPTER I; 



HARMONY OF THE CHRISTIAN WALK. 1 
" Enoch walked with God." Gen. 5 ;24. 

The fifth chapter of Genesis is a monotonous record 
of names and numbers. It is like a walk in a forest 
of long-lived, leafless oaks. It is, moreover, a wilder- 
ness of wickedness. "The whole earth was corrupt 
and filled with violence." "It repented the Lord 
that He had made man," "Behold, I will destroy 
him with a flood of waters." One oak, however, in 
the heart of the wilderness was green, like the tree 
planted by the river whose leaf withereth not ; for 
"Enoch walked with God." 

Climate and soil do not account for everything. 
The palm tree grows on the edge of the desert, with 
leaf clean and green. It sends its roots down through 
the sand till it reaches moisture in the depths. The 
edelweiss, with dense clusters, flowers on the summit m 
of the Alps. The "traveler's joy" blooms on the 
highest peak of Teneriffe. The samphire grows in 
clefts of the rock far above the reach of the sea. In 
Wyoming the hot spring flows hard by the snow-drift. 
Sodom had its Lot, Egypt its Joseph, Babylon its 
Daniel. Abijah dwelt in the house of Jeroboam; and 
in this antediluvian chapter of the early twilight, 
bracketed with men whose alone biography is that 
they lived and died, is found a man who walked with 
God. 



(9) 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Surely the record is remarkable. What reticence! 
What omission! He lived 365 years, and yet his is the 
briefest biography ever r penned. Forster's life of 
Dickens covers three volumes. Washington Irving's 
life by his nephew enlarges to four volumes. Masson 
takes six folios to complete the tragedy of Milton's 
career. Lord Macaulay fills eight duodecimos on six- 
teen years of England's history. It takes the author 
thirty-two volumes to tell Napoleon's story. But 
here a simple line is all. The description is pointed, 
yet pregnant. The words cut through the outer shell 
and with a single stroke lay bare the man. One could 
have wished, indeed, that the full record of his life had 
been chronicled, as also the story of his long-lived 
son, Methuselah, and many another Bible hero. But 
differently has it been decreed. Just one dip of the 
pen, one stroke of the pencil, must suffice. Oh, for 
grace so to live that when God calls us our monument 
may be immortalized with the noblest epitaph that 
was ever chiselled into marble — 4 'He walked with 
God"! 

A MAN'S WALK. 

Now a man's walk is a revelator of the man. Gait 
and gesture are an index to character. You can form 
opinion, approximately true, from swing and carriage. 
The movement of hand and head and foot is pregnant 
with meaning. 

He who walks erect and upright evidences emphasis, 
self-esteem. The gentle noiseless stepper is a schemer. 
The shambler is an idler. The short, quick, American 
step is full of business and "go." We all know the 
broad, swaggering bully, who stands with feet apart 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



ii 



under lamp post and street corner. One walks "tall," 
another walks "awry," a third has a slouching gait, a 
fourth walks "heel and toe." We have students of 
phrenology and palmistry; it is not strange that there 
should be a language in the walk. 

Scripture figures it. We are to walk, " not after the 
flesh, but after the Spirit." We are to walk "worthy 
of the vocation wherewith we are called." We are 
to walk "worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing." We 
are to walk " circumspectly." We are to walk "in the 
light. ' ' We are to walk ' 1 by faith. " " What doth the 
Lord require of thee but to do justly, and love mercy, 
and walk humbly with thy God?" 

What, then, is implied in walking with God? 
Three things: Harmony, humility, holiness. 

I. HARMONY. 

Walking with God, first of all, implies harmony with 
Him. 

Now, by nature we are not on good terms with God. 
"The carnal man is enmity against God," and there 
must first be reconciliation. 

"How can two walk together, except they be 
agreed?" Amos asked that question, and, Bible or 
no Bible, there is remorseless logic in that little word 
"can." An appeal is it to the nature of things, and 
"the nature of things is the law of God." Harmony 
of sound is music. Harmony of word to thought is 
poetry. Harmony of color is beauty. The most 
beautiful thing in nature is the rainbow; God blends 
the colors. Harmony of cog and wheel and axle 
makes the perfect mechanism. Everything is in its 
place. Part answers part. The most perfect mech- 



12 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES: 



anism in the universe is the universe itself. No oiling 
does it need, no winding, no repair; every planet in its 
orbit ; every star in its appointed function. There the 
great system rolls without a murmur — for endless 
years the same. All thy works do praise thee, Lord! 
Man alone mutinies and rebels. 

Life, the philosophers are telling us, is correspond- 
ence with environment. In disease or death some- 
* thing is thrown out of correspondence. The deaf man 
is thrown out of correspondence with the world of 
sound ; the blind man with the world of beauty. We 
are fearfully and wonderfully made. Co-relation of 
part with part is intimate, and any interference means 
friction. The perfect workmanship is frictionless. 
Sin is disagreement, fermentation, rebellion, aliena- 
tion, estrangement, mutiny, discord — the one all- 
pervading discord of the universe. 

The great dramatist in the Tempest makes Ferdi- 
nand and Miranda to fall in love at first meeting. A 
glance, he says, and they "changed eyes." The true 
Christian is he who has changed eyes with God. He 
sees as God sees. " There is not an honest student of 
the Bible anywhere," says Joseph Cook, "who is not 
willing to admit that salvation is harmony with 
God" — loving what God loves, and hating what God 
hates. 

Whereso'er we differ, here we are at one. Heaven 
is not possible save as people are in accord with the 
divine law and the divine life. That is what Heaven 
means. No more can Heaven be got out of a dis- 
ordered character than can music be evoked from a 
discordant harp. Culture is pained by contact with 
coarseness. The eye of the artist is troubled with a 



CHRISTIAN WALK; 



13 



false blending of color. The ear of the musician is 
tortured with dissonance. Handel tells us that a flat- 
ness felled him like a blow. And a high, lofty moral 
nature is wounded by the world's sin and shame, and 
shrinks with grief at its beholding. Love and hate 
can never be at peace. Corruption and cleanliness 
must necessarily quarrel. This is a law woven into 
the nature of things. 

By no ingenuity could John Knox and Queen Mary 
live a happy life together. John the Baptist could 
never be at one with Herod ; no more could Paul with 
King Agrippa. When dynamite and fire sleep tran- 
quilly together, when lions learn to lie down lovingly 
with lambs, when leopards kennel peaceably with kids, 
then perhaps right and wrong may clasp hand friendly ; 
but till that time Christianity means war. Until a 
man is washed in the blood of Jesus from the guilt of 
sin and the power of sin and the love of sin, he cannot 
be at peace in the presence of infinite holiness. 

Strike a note on the piano, and the corresponding 
string of the violin in the room vibrates. A voice has 
spoken, and kindred voices start up the echo. Like 
seeks like. Each note calls up its brother note. 
Strike all the keys together, and although there is 
discord at first, yet some strong notes will gather up 
and drown the others, and the final vibration in the 
distance is a soft, pleasing tone. This it is that makes 
it so hard to be a Christian. The more refined the 
music, the greater the risk of discord, and Christianity 
is the most refined music that was ever heard. The 
higher the note, the easier to detect a flatness, and the 
life of God in Jesus is the highest note that was ever 
compassed. 



i 4 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 

HARMONY THROUGH OBEDIENCE.' 

Let us remember that harmony comes through 
obedience. 

If man is his own best friend, he is also his own worst 
enemy. We pull counter to the current of our being. 
There is harmony in music because in music there is 
no self-will. Music is built on law. Man did not 
, make this law; he has simply discovered it. If he 
breaks it the music ceases. Each Haydn and Handel 
is as much bound by it as each amateur. 

The same is true of man's relation to his every art. 
Find out its principles, and all the genius of that art 
is yours. But disobey its principles; "try to excel in 
any other way than by conformity to its nature, and 
all that art contends against you, and balks you at 
every step." I cannot change ocean current or tide, 
but I can build my ship and stretch my sail, and by 
adapting me to wind and wave I can gain any Liver- 
pool or Queenstown. I cannot conquer lightning 
save as I learn the law of lightning and submit. 
"Obedience pulls the sting out of the lightning, and 
makes it harmless." Fire is a bad master; it is a 
good servant. By accepting its mastery I make it 
my slave. 

So in the spiritual; we must obey God's law. Our 
will must be confederate with His will. When we 
put ourselves into right relations with divine forces, 
then will they do our bidding and be our friends. 
Obedience to the law of steel gives the engine its 
I strength. Obedience to the law of stone gives the 
sculptor his Apollo. Obedience to the law of wood 
gives the side-board its glossy finish. Obedience to 
the law of fire gives the winter home its comfort. 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



Obedience to the law of electricity gives the telephone 
wire its cunning. Obedience to the law of govern- 
ment gives the citizen liberty and happiness. 

The old Greeks taught their children how to sing, 
because it taught them how to be obedient. This is 
a difficult universe to the man who drives dead against 
it, but to the man who has learned the secret of har- 
mony through obedience it is a happy place. Dis- 
cord is sickness ; harmony is health. Discord is rest- 
lessness; harmony is peace. Discord is sorrow; har- 
mony is joy. Discord is death; harmony- is life. 
Discord is hell; harmony is heaven. He who is in 
love and peace with his neighbors, filling the sphere 
•where God has placed him, hath heaven in his heart 
already. Only through blue in the eye, the scientist 
tells us, can blue out of the eye be seen. Only 
through C in the ear can C out of the ear be heard. 
Only through Heaven down here can Heaven up there 
be interpreted. " The natural man discerneth not the 
things of the Spirit." That good German, Bengel, 
after a hard day's study, retired to rest. Some one 
in the adjoining room heard his prayer — 

" Blessed Lord, we are on the same good old terms # 
to-night.' ' 

Then the good man slept. His life was keyed to 
the divine life. His heart kept time to the pulse of 
God. He had peace. 

ii. humility: 

The pulpit is fond of noting how the word humility 
has changed its meaning. In olden times it was a 
word of slaves. It was difficult to offer a man a 
greater insult than to call him humble. Humility 



16 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



was considered a loss of self-respect. Christ came; 
He took the hateful word and made it honorable. 
To-day it is called the Christian's loveliest virtue, and 
his crowning grace. It was pride that changed angels 
into demons ; it is humility that changes demons into 
angels. 

"The Christian/' says Guthrie, 4 'is like the ripening 
corn; the riper he grows, the more lowly he bends." 

What is humility? It literally means a low esti- 
mate of self. But, then, all estimates are relative. 
The value of anything depends on the standard used. 
Everything hinges on the unit. You are sailing down 
the river, and you think your yacht passing swift 
until you meet a swifter. So long as a dwarf lives 
among dwarfs he thinks himself a giant. Saul was 
humbled when he saw Goliath. The Catskills are 
huge until they see the Alps — the Alps until they see 
the Himalayahs. The atmosphere is clear as crystal 
till the room is darkened and a ray of sunshine steals 
through the crevice ; then millions of floating particles 
can be detected. A poorly clad boy in the presence 
of one neatly dressed is conscious of his clothing. 
The little stain of rust is very prominent on a polished 
razor-blade. 

Now, a man's standing according to the Bible is 
his standing in God's sight. The apostle writes,' 
"We all have come short of the glory of God." God 
in the world must be the standard of the world: 
When you wish to learn the true character of your 
life, measure it by the laws of God. They that know 
their God will be humble. They that know them- 
selves cannot be proud. If prosperity raise thee 
to a dizzy height, then, lest thy head be turned, 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



17 



look up. Do not stoop till you are smaller than 
yourself. Stand up at your real stature by the 
side of something larger. For a little time walk with 
God. Look up and grasp His greatness; then look 
down and contemplate thine own littleness; thus is 
pride slain. A leading feature of true Christian per- 
fection is a consciousness of imperfection. 

Do not try to be humble. Some of the proudest 
people are those who are trying to be humble. They 
are proud of their humility. 

" The devil did grin, 
For his darling sin 
Is pride that apes humility." 

Pliny said: " It is as hard to teach pride as to fill 
an empty bottle corked." Pride is the attic of the 
house — the highest room and the emptiest. It is a 
magnet pointing selfward. Proud people are unim- 
aginative. They are self-centered. They are so 
lifted up with what they are that they blind them- 
selves to what they might be. 

The certain cure is a vision of the ideal: for the 
proud man is looking away from God. He has 
turned his back on the fountain of light. He has 
set himself against the spirit of incarnate Love, who 
said: "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, for I am meek and lowly in heart." 
Thus does he make of his life a discord, a jar. 

Moreover, pride unfits for service. We cannot do 
the Master's work until we are "clothed with humil- 
ity,'' and have the Master's spirit. " I beseech you," 
wrote St. Paul, "by the meekness and gentleness of 
Christ." " In lowliness of mind let each esteem other 
better than himself." 



18 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Mr. Speer tells a story of a visit to a college in the 
South. It was a poor college, but one that sought 
to do the will of God. 

" There were not many rooms in it," he goes on to 
say, "so the president gave me his room. I was 
awakened very early in the morning by my door 
opening. I did not want to appear inquisitive, so I 
lay quietly and said nothing. It was the president. I 
saw him take my boots, carry them into an adjoining 
room, kneel down on the floor and black them. That 
act went straight to my heart." 

This is the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, who 
"made Himself of no reputation, but took upon Him 
the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of 
men, and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled 
Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross." 

Let us hasten to note the sad reflection that there 
is no vanity save in man. The wind gives its music 
without boasting. The rainbow unrolls its gorgeous 
tints without noise or flourish. The modest violet 
^ fills the air with fragrant breath, its own little cheek 
hidden among the timothy. Gravity blows no 
trumpet on the corner to be seen of men. The night- 
ingale pours its little heart out— herself unseen amid 
the black leaves of the silent night. Man alone is 
pompous and elate. The infinitely little hath a pride 
infinitely great. 

III. HOLINESS. 

There is a series of English words that have the 
same root — health, whole, holy. They are all 
branches of the same stem. "They that are whole 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



19 



need not a physician, but they that are sick." 
Why ? Because sin has halved us. Christian healthi- 
ness is Christian holiness. Christian holiness is 
Christian wholeness. A perfectly healthy life is a 
perfectly holy life and a perfectly whole life. Holiness 
is that state of the soul which results when the whole 
of it is healthy. This means strength, robustness, 
virility, all-roundedness, perfect development. Holi- 
ness is the completeness of character. 

I like that picture of Jesus by Holman Hunt. 
There He stands, not the weak, womanly divinity- 
student figure that the old masters paint; but a 
strong, ruddy, wholesome lad, in bare foot and with a 
far-away look in His eye. 

Now, God gives us the laws of spiritual healthiness 
in Scripture, and one of these is companionship. " He 
that walketh with the wise shall be wise, but the 
companion of fools shall be destroyed." 

Lord Bacon says: " No man doth accompany with 
others but he learneth, ere he is aware, some gesture, 
voice, or fashion." Shakspere adds: "It is certain 
that wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men 
take disease, one of another." " Evil communications 
corrupt good manners," writes St. Paul. There is an 
old Latin proverb: "If you live with those who are 
lame, you will learn to limp." He that comes from 
the stable has an odor of the horse. He that works 
with the chimney smells of its smoke. He who com- 
panions with the ugly soon undergoes a sinister trans- 
formation. He who frequents places where shame holds 
carnival, will soon bear the brand of vice. A man is 
known by the company he keeps. If that with which 
you consort is below you, it degrades; if above it, 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



uplifts; In electricity there are what are called induced 
currents. Here are two parallel wires. Pass a cur- 
rent through the first. A fainter throb will thrill the 
second. That is how they telegraph from moving 
trains. There is an electric contagion. Iron near a 
magnet is magnetized. There is a valley in California 
where nothing is grown but roses. During the flower- 
ing season it is a wilderness of flowers. It scents the 
atmosphere for miles. So saturated is the air with 
perfume that it clings to the clothing for days and 
weeks. 

Saadi, the Persian poet, was one day bathing. A 
friend put into his hand a piece of scented clay. 

"Art thou musk or ambergris ?" asked the poet. 

"I was just a piece of clay," it answered, "but 
being in the company of a rose-bush all summer, the 
quality of my sweet companion was communicated to 
me." 

Well did the old philosopher say that each growing 
child should have every morning some beautiful 
picture to refresh the eye, some immortal music to 
delight the ear, and some perfect poem to read and 
tone up the sense of beauty. The soul living amid 
such loveliness must soon grow fair and lovely. 
k Astronomers are said to be men of tranquil tem- 
perament. Constantly dwelling on the "expressive 
silence" of the starry depths, their souls catch the 
spirit of the heavenly quiet. 

This is the old mystery of environment. Certain 
animals take on the color of their habitat. Witness 
the sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of 
the polar bear, the stripes of the Bengal tiger. The 
chameleon takes its tint from the branch to which it 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



21 



clings. Wallace mentions the case of a parrot which 
changes its color from green to red when fed on certain 
fishes. 

In nature environment is revolutionary. Do oranges 
grow in Florida? Climate, not soil, is the cause. Is 
the polar bear found in Greenland ? Climate, not seals 
or fishes, is the secret. Is a man a companion of 
books? He shows it in his face. Is he a worker in 
coal? His body tells the grimy tale. Does he linger 
long 'mid honeysuckle and mignonette? There's a 
fragrance from his dress. Verily the body is the 
soul's interpreter. A man's embodiment is written 
o'er with the history of his companionships. 

Nothing writes so unmistakably as the company 
we keep. It was said of Keats that " his face was like 
the face of one who had seen a vision." So absorbed 
was he in the beautiful, so fondly did he love that 
vision splendid, that his very face took on the love- 
liness. Shakspere's face, we are told, bore the marks 
of meditation. There was a fulness and a calmness 
that came from brooding o'er the deep things of life. 
Charles Dickens pictures a monk beginning his career 
as a beautiful child. But he fell into sin. He pon- 
dered over vice during the day. He played with little 
angel demons in his dreams during the night. For 
him to live was iniquity v Soon the face of the inno- 
cent youth grew fiend-like and depraved, and he 
ended his career a bruised, broken-down, blotched 
criminal. By the which Dickens means that asso- 
ciating with sin will put a twist in the eye and a 
coarseness in the countenance. 

When Da Vinci painted his "Last Supper," he had 
the faces of the eleven disciples completed before he 



22 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



had secured a model for the portrait of either Jesus or 
Judas. He spent many months in unsuccessful search. 
One day, at a service in the great Milan cathedral, he 
caught the eye of a young man in the choir. " There's 
my man," thought Leonardo, as he studied the strik- 
ing features. 

He sought him out and secured him to sit for the 
immortal painting to represent our Saviour. 

Then Judas alone was left. The artist was many 
years seeking a model among the haunts of crime. It 
was in Rome it happened. There he met his Judas in 
a prison cell, and had him sketched. The pulpit has 
never tired telling the story to half-incredulous wor- 
shippers of Da Vinci's finding out, later, that these 
two men were the same ; and the world will never 
cease to wonder how a face that was taken for the 
calm, strong gentle face of Jesus, could ever, by any 
mystery of iniquity, have its lines so defaced and its 
beauty so disfigured as to pose, only ten years after, 
as a prototype of Judas. 

Thus in many ways and strange the face tells the 
story of the man. If holiness can write beauty on the 
facial features, sin can wash said beauty speedily away. 
For sin, like love, hath power to convert. We all, 
with open face beholding as in a glass the witchery of 
sin, are soon changed into the same image. It was a 
patent fact in the olden times that slave-owners, by 
living among their slaves, learned to copy their vices. 
Notwithstanding that they looked down upon them, 
they yet became passionate and cruel like the poor 
wretches whom they oppressed. Contrariwise, Plu- 
tarch tells us that he wrote his forty-six " parallel 
lives" of great and good men in order to fill his mind 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



23 



with pictures of the best and worthiest characters. 
Their virtues served him as a ''looking glass in which 
he might see how to order and adorn his own life." 

Think of that incident related by Henry Drum- 
mond. A woman, whose husband was dying, came 
late one evening and requested the preacher-scientist 
to come to her home. 

"My husband is deein', sir. He's no able to speak 
wi' you, and he's no able to hear you. But I would 
like him to hae a breath o' you aboot him afore he 
dees." 

Another story is told of Frederick W. Robertson. 
Stopford Brooke was writing his biography, and he 
went down to Brighton to gather information. He. 
visited a book-seller who had known Robertson. 

"Do you remember anything interesting about 
Mr. Robertson?" he asked. 

The book-seller, after a little, took him into the 
room, and pointing to the great preacher's portrait on 
the wall, he said: 

"Whenever I am tempted to do anything mean, I 
just run in here and look at that picture, and the pure 
face recalls me to my better self." 

If a picture of the great preacher had such power, 
what must the real man have been! Surely no one 
could have lived with Robertson without growing pure 
and good. What must it have been to have lived 
with Jesus? It is said of Lord Peterborough that 
when he lodged for a time with Fenelon, he exclaimed: 

" If I stay here much longer I shall be a Christian in 
spite of myself/! 

Perhaps the most pointed story of all is told of John 
Wesley. Two rough boys filled their pockets with 



I 



24 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 

stones, and stole into the room where he was to preach. 
When they looked on the old man's face, lighted up 
with such a glow of goodness, one of the lads whis- 
pered : 

"He's not a man, Bill; he's not a man." 

When the service was over and Wesley passed out, 
the same lad felt the sleeve of his gown, touched the 
arm and whispered: 

"Bill, he is a man; he is a man." 

John Wesley felt the touch, and turned. He saw 
the boy's admiring face, so early soiled with sin. He 
put his hand on his head. 

"The Lord bless thee, my lad." 

We do not wonder that he became in later life one, 
of his band of preachers. 

Perhaps from such stories as these we can under- 
stand better the narrative of Moses coming down from 
the mountain where he had been enjoying the com- 
panionship of God. His face shone so that the people 
were afraid to look thereon. Or that other narrative 
about the martyr Stephen. The council said his face 
was as though it had been the face of an angel. 

Sweeter than any tint of painter, fairer than any 
touch of sculptor, is the beauty with which holiness 
brightens up the soul. It lights up the sunken eye of 
sickness. It warms the cheek of depression and des- 
pair. The old classics tell us that a woman cannot 
choose whether or not she shall be beautiful at twenty ; 
but it is her own fault if she is not beautiful at sixty, 
% just as the maple gets gorgeous on the verge of winter. 
The Lord God is a Sun, and we will shine, too, if we 
get into the stream of His brightness. The vapor, 
apart from the sun, is murky and black, but when the 



CHRISTIAN WALK. 



25 



light pierces it at eventide, it enriches it. See it 
drinking in the beams of light! It blushes into gold, 
and crimson, and cinnabar, and purple, and all manner 
of infinite delights. Human life is nothing till you 
lift it into the sky. Let us mount nearer Heaven. 
Let us draw near to God, and our soul will be pure, 
our path luminous. 

Walking with God, then, implies harmony, humil- 
ity, and holiness. " Without holiness, no man shall 
see the Lord." Christianity is the religion of com- 
panionship. The eagle cannot rise with one wing; 
nor can man. It is the highest type of friendship; 
nay, it is the perfecting of friendship. If we company 
with Jesus, we must have His mind, we must have His 
lowly spirit, and we will gradually grow into His like- 
ness. Justification is through the blood of Christ; 
sanctification is through the resurrection life of Christ. 

We are shaped into the likeness of what we live 
with. We are shaped into the likeness of what we 
love. When Jesus was on earth, as many as touched 
Him were made whole. We all, with unveiled face, 
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are 
changed into the same image, even as from the Lord 
the Spirit. 

People speak of going to Heaven as if it were a 
concert-room, to enter which a ticket only is required. 
Nothing could be more unscriptural. Nothing could 
be more unreasonable. Heaven is not a place to 
which we are admitted, but a place into which we are 
born, for " except a man be born again, he cannot see 
the Kingdom of God.' ' It is a little short of foolish, 
the way some talk of going to heaven when they die. 
They exclude God from their life on earth. They find 



26 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



j 



no joy in His presence here. Heaven would be a 
painful imprisonment to them. The presence of Jesus 
on earth was torture to the demons. " Who then shall 
ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean 
hands and a pure heart." And our hands are made 
clean and our hearts made pure as we trust in the 
cleansing blood of Jesus. 

Enoch went to Heaven before he died; so must we. 
As the old theologians used to say: 1 'We must have 
a little heaven to get to heaven in." Enoch kept step 
with Deity here below; so must we. His heart was 
knit to God by trust — complete, constant trust. For 
him to live was always "Nearer, my God, to Thee." 
That is what made of his life an epic of completeness. 



! 



CHAPTER II. 



HARMONY WITH THE WILL OF GOD. 

" Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the 
ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the 
seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord." 
Psalm 1:1. 

One of the interesting chapters in the tragedy 
of great men is the story of Samuel Johnson. His life 
was tuned to the minor key. Ill health made him 
morbid; poverty made him sour. In Westminster 
Abbey he sleeps by the side of David Garrick — 
laughter and tears resting together. 

Dr. Johnson wrote a famous book called Rasselas. 
He tells us he wrote it in the evenings of a week to 
pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It is really 
a search for the secret of happiness. 

Rasselas, the son of the mighty emperor of Abyssyn- 
ia, was confined in a private palace until the order of 
succession should call him to the throne. The palace 
was situated in a rich valley surrounded on every side 
by mountains. It was entered by a canon cut under 
the rock, the mouth of which was guarded by huge 
iron gates forged by the giants of ancient days. In 
the midst of the valley a lake lay, peaceful, stocked 
with fish of every species and fowl of every feather, 
whom nature has taught "to dip the wing. " On the 
sides of the mountain were trees of every leaf. On 
the banks of the lake were flowers of every color. No 
wind but wafted spices; no garden but breathed 

(27) 



28 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



freshness; no day but dropped fruits rich and rare; 
Every blessing of nature was there collected; every 
desire gratified. Nothing that art, music, novelty or 
merriment could do; nothing that sense could wish, or 
appetite long for, was wanting to make life lovely in 
this blissful retreat. 

And yet Rasselas knew not content in this happy 
valley. He longed for freedom beyond the mount- 
ains. Alone would he wander in solitary walk, 
meditating escape. Week after week would he 
spend exploring the canons and clambering the cliffs 
to see if there was any aperture. Ofttimes would he 
look at the massive iron gate, guarded by sentinels 
who never slumbered. 

Three years did he spend in this fruitless search, and 
then communicated his plans to Imlac. Imlac was 
one of the tutors of the royal family, and, walking one 
day through the groves with Rasselas, he was telling 
him the story of his life. 

"Tell me," said the prince, "tell me truly, art thou 
content in this valley, or dost thou wish again thy 
wandering life?" 

"Great prince," said Imlac, " I will speak the truth 
to you. I know not one of your teachers who does 
not lament the hour he entered this abode. " 

" My dear Imlac, " returned the prince, " I will open 
to thee my heart. I have long meditated escape. 
Teach me how to break my prison bars. Thou shalt 
be the partner of my flight. Yon gate is strong, yon 
mountain steep, yon sentinels ever sleepless. " 

So the two became friends, and next morning 
started out to plan their escape. For days they 
scaled crag and steep, returning each evening to the 



WILL OF GOD. 



29 



palace. Patience at last rewarded them with a 
fissure in the rock. They pierced the cavity, and 
issuing to the top of the mountain they beheld the 
Nile— a narrow thread — meandering beneath them. 
So, laden with jewels, they descended into the plain, 
and bade goodbye to the happy valley, as they 
believed, forever. 

We will not attempt to follow them in their world- 
tour. Human life they studied in all its phases — 
greatness and lowliness, wisdom and folly, culture and 
coarseness, virtue and vice, hardship and ease, the 
task and the tool, the cloister and the market-place. 
They went to the temple of melody, where St. Cecilia 
sang. They went to the temple of laughter, where 
Democritus lived. They went to the temple of jus- 
tice, where Aristides sat. They went to the temple of 
wisdom, where Solomon dropped his mantle. But 
happiness was not. Rasselas came back a sadder and 
a wiser man. 

The search for the blessed secret still goes on. 
Rasselas was not the first explorer in a region 
unknown; he will not be the last. The quest for 
happiness has engaged the minds of earth's wisest 
children since the days of Plato and Epictetus. For 
many it is life's summum bonum: for all of us it hath 
attractiveness and charm; for the Christian it is life's 
last reward. And our text lends a clew to the intri- 
cate pursuit. 

"Oh the happiness of the man that walketh not in 
the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of 
sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but 
whose delight is in the law of the Lord. " 

Happiness thus consists in being in harmony with 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



the law of God, and in finding in that law our medita- 
tion and delight. Let each soul ask itself, 4 'What is 
the Father's will for me?" then be obedient to the 
heavenly vision ; thus will the blessed prize be won. 

Perhaps we can simplify the search by limiting the 
field of exploration. 

Happiness is bounded on the north by contentment of state, 
on the south by lowliness of mind, 
on the east by helpfulness of life, 
on the west by holiness of heart. 

I. CONTENTMENT. 

"I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therein 
to be content." (Phil. 4, 11.) Contentment is har- 
mony with the Father's will. 

One of Addison's chapters in the Spectator is a 
dream which he entitles the " Mountain of Miseries. " 
The great essayist dreamed that a proclamation had 
been made by Jupiter that every mortal should bring 
his griefs and woes on a certain day, and throw them 
together in a heap, in a certain large plain that had 
been appointed for the purpose. So taking his stand 
in the center, he watched with a great deal of interest 
the whole human race marching up in line, and throw- 
ing down their several loads, which in time grew up 
into a prodigious mountain that rose above the 
clouds. 

One poor old haggard wretch carried a bundle 
under her cloak. She threw it down. The name of it 
was poverty. Another, after much laboring, dragged 
a heavy luggage to the mass, which on opening was 
found to be his wife. Old women threw down their 
wrinkles, and many negroes their tawny skin. There 



WILL OF GOD. 



3i 



were red noses, grey hairs, thick lips, bald heads and 
rusty teeth ; in fact the mountain consisted largely of 
bodily ailments. Rapidly the great massive bulk m 
grew and swelled to ponderous dimensions, but 
strange to say there was not a vice, or a crime, or a 
frailty, or a passion, or a folly, or a sin. It was a 
sorrow, or a trouble, or an affliction, or a remorse, or a 
disappointment, or a physical distemper. 

Standing and regarding very attentively this con- 
fusion of chaos and the thronging, surging multitudes 
that swarmed around the mountain, the dream was 
changed. A second edict proceeded and came forth 
from the god of the thunderbolt, that as every one had 
to have some burden there was to be an exchange, and 
each must return to his home with the bundle that had 
been assigned to him. 

And now the hurry and nervousness were intense. 
Some who had brought sickness went away with 
poverty. Some who had carried hunger to the 
mountain bore away thirst. One lady exchanged a 
birth-mark for a bad reputation. A venerable hump- 
backed gentleman exchanged his deformity for a 
rebellious boy that had been thrown into the heap by 
an angry father. A certain old lady who came with a 
lock of grey hair, disappeared with the asthma. The 
whole plain was filled with murmuring and discontent. 
Every one was repining. There was perfect unan- 
imity in one thing, that the new affliction was worse 
than the old; " and I learned a lesson, " says the great 
essayist, "that our Heavenly Father knows best, and 
assigns to each soul the sphere for which it is best 
fitted, and the burden which it can most patiently 
bear. " 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Surely that old story of the aged hermit in the 
desert hath valuable lessons for us on the blessedness 
of trust, and the committal of our lives to Him who 
knoweth best. He planted an olive by his hut, and 
prayed for rain. So the gentle rain came down, and 
gradually grew to torrents. Then fancying some hot 
sun would hurry the water down into the roots to free 
the salts and phosphates and gases, and force them up 
into the leaves and branches, he prayed again, and the 
hot sun shot forth its fiery darts. Next, the old 
hermit imagined a cool wave might put snap and 
hardihood into the fibre. So he prayed a third time, 
when next morning hoar frost settled on the ground. 
Then thinking a hot wind, to swell the bud and push 
out the blossom, might be beneficial, he prayed once 
more ; so the south wind blew. In a few days the olive 
tree was dead. 

The story goes on to tell how some few weeks later, 
visiting a brother hermit who had a large, beautiful 
olive at his door, he asked : 

" Comrade, how came yon goodly tree? " 

" I planted it, and left God to take care of it, " came 
the answer. 

" Ah, I planted one, too, but it died. " 

The divine Husbandman knows best where to plant 
us, beloved. He knows best how to care for us, too. 
He loves us. He will do nothing save what is "for our 
good. If pruning and purging will make us more 
fruit-bearing, that is why He uses the knife. If 
dressing and grafting will improve the tone of our 
lives, let us not rebel. It is only that we should bring 
forth more fruit, and that our fruit should remain. If 



WILL OP GOD, 



33 



He transplant us it is for our own welfare. He 
knows where we will thrive best. 

Let us be content to put ourselves entirely in our 
Father's care. Let us learn the secret of how to live 
in harmony with His will. The life of insurrection is a 
life of pain. " Every time the sheep bleats it loses a 
mouthful, and every time we grumble we lose a bless- 
ing.' ' Only by living the life of trust can happiness 
be found. His is the glad heart who has mastered 
that contentment of state in which the apostle 
rejoiced. To long for the forbidden country is to 
invite uneasiness and heart-ache. For happiness is 
bounded on the north by contentment. 

II. — LOWLINESS OF MIND. 

On the south, lowliness of mind. Lowliness is the 
second boundary to the happy life, for thus only can 
we hope to company with Him who said, " Come unto 
Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of 
Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. " 

Paul says, "Do not think more highly of yourself 
than you ought to think. " " In lowliness of mind let 
each esteem others better than themselves." "Let 
this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who 
*■ * * humbled Himself . " The world has so little 
understood the Christian teaching that it uses the 
term 'poor-spirited' as a mark of opprobrium. The 
voice of the world is: " Happy the great, the rich, the 
powerful, the well-to-do! happy the life that lives in 
luxury! happy earth's dignitaries! happy those unap- 
proachable ones who wield the rods of empire and 
dictate the forms and etiquettes of life ! II But such is 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



not the mind of the Master. His teaching is that the 
great are they who serve; the happy, they who 
minister. 

There can be little doubt that in the science of living 
with men, to feel one's self-importance is to invite 
disquiet and aching of heart. For nothing causes 
such rankling pain as pride. "The proud man poisons 
his own banquet, and then eats it. " Augustus 
Caesar bethought himself a god, but how jealous and 
irritable it rendered his life! The ruling passion of 
Alexander Pope undoubtedly was vanity and love of 
applause, and how it soured and embittered his 
nature we all know. His was the venom of wounded 
pride. Macaulay says of him : 

" His life was one long series of tricks. He was all 
stiletto and mask. To cheat and malign was his 
natural habit, if only reputation could be secured 
thereby, for admiration and applause were as neces- 
sary to him as the air he breathed. " 

How pitifully ludicrous must seem to the all-seeing 
One the vauntings of our poor frail human nature! 
The old Roman emperors compelled obsequious 
courtiers to shade their eyes when being ushered 
s into their presence, thus acknowledging the glare and 
dazzle of their glory. By some strange sophistry we 
convince ourselves of our distinction, that we forsooth 
are intellectual and great and learned, that our fellow- 
mortals should look up to us and kneel down before 
us and accept our dictum with lowly acquiescence. 
Surely the man who reasons thus is certain to be 
unhappy, because he is certain to meet with contra- 
diction. The man who feels that he is unappreciated 
and wronged and slighted unless he gets everything 



WILL OF GOD. 



35 



he wishes, and in the way he wishes, is certain to 
suffer mortification and bitterness of soul, because he 
cannot possibly get everything he wishes and in the 
way he wishes. How much each Dolly Varden suffers 
for her self-admiring vanities! Our wonder does not 
greatly stir us when we read that Beau Brummel was 
imprisoned for debt and thereafter died in an asylum 
of remorse, for 4 'pride goeth before destruction, and 
an haughty spirit before a fall. " Ofttimes we smile 
over Mrs Poyser's cock, who fancied the sun rose every 
morning to hear him crow. But are we not all apt to 
think that the whole world of men and things was 
created more or less as a sort of pleasureable adjunct 
to our convenience, that we are the whole triumph, 
that our fellow-mortals were made to tickle our vani- 
ties and minister to our wants, that even the stars 
were set up there in their lofty silence to "make the 
sky look interesting for us at night " ? " Fill a person 
with love for himself, " says a witty Frenchman, " and 
what runs over will be your share. " Aye, truly has it 
been said that love is the driving power that moves 
humanity, and 'tis flattery that oils the wheels. 

Surely a few thoughts should serve to prick the 
bubble of man's complacency. What have I that I 
have not received? Where did I get it? How long 
may I hope to keep it? Let us but know ourselves, 
and we will not only reverence ourselves but also 
humble ourselves. Self-knowledge is the parent of 
self-abasement. For we are but empty vessels until 
filled with divine gifts, and even the vessel is His free 
sovereign bounty. No honest reverent soul can look 
back over the story of his life-history without feeling 
that God has made him what he is. Whenever a 



3« 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Christian gathers up his experience into one 
comprehensive truth, that truth has always been, 
"By the grace of God I am what I am." He is a 
poor pitiable creature and calling for our forbearance, 
who does not realize that the best things in him are 
not self -wrought, but God- wrought. 

Often we hear of self-made men. It is a catchy 
phrase, but false. No self-made men are there. 
That man who studiously stands before the mirror 
and makes devotion, is neither an excellent nor an 
admirable figure. If you have any real worth, dear 
reader, it is but a small fraction that you owe yourself. 
The true architects have been the parents who gave 
you birth, the teachers who taught you, the atmos- 
phere that nurtured you, and the good kind Father 
above who endowed you so munificently with health 
and reason and blessings unnumbered. By the grace 
of God you have what you have. By the grace of 
God you are what you are. 

When we have that full consciousness deep-rooted 
in our hearts of our entire un worthiness, of how much 
we receive, of how little we deserve, then are we seek- 
ing the prize of happiness in its native home. 

III. HELPFULNESS. 

Bounded on the east by helpfulness of life. " Bear 
ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of 
Christ. " (Gal. 6:2.) 

Lord Byron says: "All who would win joy must 
share it; happiness was born a twin." This is the 
peculiar significance of the Christian spirit. Selfish- 
ness for the moment is lost sight of. There is a loving 
contrivance on the part of every one to provoke 



WILL OF GOD. 



37 



somebody else into being glad. The word miser and 
the word miserable have the same root-meaning. 
The miser is a miserable man. Selfishness is swift 
poison to the soul's peace. If in the kingdom of 
happiness discontent hath slain its thousands, and 
pride its tens of thousands, surely selfishness can 
claim its hundreds of thousands. 

The chemist tells us that the carbon and the dia- 
mond are chemically identical, the only difference 
being that the charcoal drinks in every particle of light 
that falls on it, and remains dead black, while the # 
diamond reflects all, and becomes the most brilliant 
of jewels. So there are grasping lives that are wholly 
self-centered, but the beauty of the life of Jesus was 
its considerateness, its helpfulness, its reflecting glory. 

" I want it said of me, " said Abraham Lincoln, "by 
those who know me best, that I have always plucked a 
thistle and planted a flower wherever a flower would 
grow. " A friend told me recently that he was once 
conducting the funeral service of a member of his 
church, and the wife of the departed told him that in 
thirty years of married life she did not remember one 
morning ever having passed without family worship, 
and that in all these years she never heard a prayer 
but had this sentence in it, 

"Lord, help us to make somebody happy to-day. " 

Strange that we are so slow in mastering this lesson 
of the soul's delight! When we call to mind that it is 
written so plainly on every page of our daily living, 
how is it that we so easily mistake the letters? " Glad- 
ness is found in giving"; our consciences answer 
"yes." "More blessed to give than to receive"; 'tis 
the Scriptural and eternal law. How doth it happen, 



38 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



then, that we persist in wresting Scripture and 
experience to our own discomfort? If happiness is 
found in making other people happy on the 25th of 
December, would it not be wise, some one suggests, to 
try the scheme on the 4th of July? If it holds true on 
Sunday, would it not be well to test the plan on 
Monday? 

A lady paused in front of the village doctor's house, 
and inquired of the child playing on the door step if 
his father was at home. 

" No, " said the lad, " he's away. " 

" Where do you think I could find him ? " 

■"Well," returned the little fellow, innocently, 
"you've got to look for some place where people are 
sick or hurt, or something like that; papa's always 
helping somebody. " 

"When the sun shines, it shines everywhere," was 
Ruben's motto, and as we look into the great world of 
action we find this truth radiating everywhere. 
Xerxes proposed a reward to the inventor of a new 
pleasure. Every morning such rewards are offered in 
the court of the soul-kingdom, and each humblest life 
may pluck the prize. No day but lends its many 
opportunities for doing good. For neither gold nor 
grandeur can make the heart glad; that is alone the 
fruitage of loving service. 

"You forgot to mention where heaven is, " said the 
good lady to her pastor after a sermon on the better 
land. 

"On yonder hilltop stands a cottage, madam," 
replied the man of God ; " a widow lives there in want ; 
she has no bread, no fuel, no medicine, and her child is 
at the point of death. If you will carry to her this 



WILL OF GOD. 



39 



afternoon some little cup of cold water in the name of 
Him who went about doing good, you will find the 
answer to your inquiry. " 

Many will recall the sweet old legend of St. Chris- 
topher, who lived in a cave hard by a swift-flowing 
river, and whose duty was to take upon his shoulders 
and bear across whoever wished to gain the opposite 
shore. Many a tired traveler he bore across the 
flood, manfully buffeting the billows. 

One night, weary from the day's toil, he fell asleep. 
Without was cold and dark and stormy. The river's 
current raged fiercely. Above the roar of the torrent 
and the screech of the winds he heard a cry, so spring- 
ing from his couch he plunged into the wild night, and 
taking his pole waded across the swollen rapids. 
Reaching the other bank, he saw a child of wondrous 
beauty pleading to be carried to the thither side. 
Taking him on his shoulders, he started across. Just 
as they were stepping into the dangerous channel in 
the centre of the raging flood, the child's sweet voice 
said, " When thou passest through the waters I will be 
with thee"; and then only did the old hermit know 
that it was the child Jesus whom he carried; and his 
arm became strong and his heart became light and 
glad. Shall we not learn the lesson of St. Chris- 
topher? Every deed of loving service to earth's 
humblest orphan child is remembered as done to Him 
who said, " He shall in no wise lose his reward. " He 
looks upon it as a personal favor. He takes it as to 
Himself, for 4 'Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the 
least of these, My brethren, ye did it unto Me. " 

IV. — HOLINESS. 

Bounded on the west by holiness of heart. " Happy 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



the man that findeth wisdom. " (Prov. 3 : 13). And 
the wise king explains what he means by wisdom in 
another chapter, when he says: " The fear of the Lord 
is the beginning of wisdom. " 

There is no happiness worth having that we cannot 
pray over, that we cannot take to the Saviour, and upon 
which we cannot ask His blessing. True, lasting 
happiness is found at the foot of the Cross, nowhere 
else. There we can have our sins forgiven and our 
souls washed in the all-atoning blood. There we can 
find peace of conscience and assurance of final victory, 
and go on our way rejoicing. The footpath to happi- 
ness stretcheth out in the same direction as the foot- 
path to holiness, and each persevering pilgrim finds 
that the journey is not long till the roads meet and 
blend and acquire a new name — the straight and 
narrow way, which is the footpath to heaven. For 
the happiness of each tired traveler consists in finding 
out the way in which God is going, and going that 
way. Godliness gives real happiness; nothing else 
does. ' ' You cannot grow the lilies of the kingdom of 
God unless you import the bulbs from heaven. " 

Oh, young men of pride and promise, know that 
happiness is only found in living the Christian life! 
Sin gives pleasure, but the coin is counterfeit. The 
pleasures of sin are for a season only. No matter 
how cool and inviting seem the paths of unrighteous- 
ness, know that lions lie in ambush, and ravenous 
beasts prowl about, and serpents lurk on either side, 
and the road gets gradually closer and narrower and 
more contracted, and the end thereof is death! Go 
east or go west, go north or go south, nature is surely 
on the track of every sin^ with headlong haste, to hurt 



WILL OF GOD. 



41 



and torment and to destroy; "for at the last sin 
biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." 
" Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of 
the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor 
sitteth in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in 
the law of the Lord. " Happiness, thus, is a spiritual 
attainment, not to be found in things. 'Twere idle 
to turn to gold and silver for gladness of heart. 

In the olden times there is a story of a great king 
who was journeying through the land, and heard a 
shepherd making music with his flute. So pleased 
was he that he invited him to his palace to charm 
away the fret and fever of life. He found him so wise 
and trustworthy that he lifted him to the highest seat 
in the cabinet of his advisers. But soon the tongue of 
envy began to whisper poisoned words in the king's 
ears, that the shepherd was secretly plotting for the 
throne. It was noted that he retired each day to his 
chamber for solitude and quiet. The king, anxious 
to discover what he was doing, one day burst open the 
door, and there sat the old shepherd clad in his 
ancient garb, with the old flute in hand, trying to call 
back the joys of his early pastoral life. Worldly 
comforts had increased, fame had come unasked, ser- 
vants and gold, hardly to be counted, had leaped to 
his slightest nod, but they had only brought with 
them care and heaviness of heart. 

There is a little tract published by the American 
Tract Society, entitled "Uncle Johnson." Uncle 
Johnson was a Virginia negro, who lived to the age of 
120. One day when at work singing in his garden, 
his pastor looked over the fence and said: 

V Uncle Eb, you seem very happy to-day. " 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



" Yes, Massa, I'se jes tinkin'. " 

" What are you thinking about? " 

" Oh, I'se jes tinkin', " said the old darkey, and the 
tears raced down the channels on his wrinkled face. 

"Well, what can it be you are thinking about that 
makes you so happy, Uncle Eb? " 

11 Oh, I'se jes tinkin' dat if de crumbs of joy dat fall 
from de Massa's table in dis world is so good, what 
will de great loaf in glory be! " 

Scatter flowers as you go, dear reader; you have 
not passed this way heretofore; you will never pass 
this way again. 



CHAPTER III. 



HARMONY OF THE WORK WITH THE WORKER. 

"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matt. 7:20. 
"Believe Me for the works' sake." John 14:11. 

A noted scoffer was once interrupted in his noisy 
excitement by two questions : 

1. What would be the effect upon this world if 
everybody was a consistent Christian? 

2. What would be the effect upon this world if 
everybody was a consistent infidel? 

The argument is a crushing one, for of a truth 
Christianity can stand such a test with a glory that 
would astonish even the most ardent enthusiasts. 
And it is the one test, let it be admitted with sorrow, 
that a reviling world is not willing to have it judged 
by. We insist on reading the Master's challenge: 
" By their creeds ye shall know them," and: " Believe 
Me for the doctrine's sake." Do men gather grapes 
of thorns? Not in the first century, said the Master. 
Or figs of thistles? Not in the twentieth. Thorns 
bruise. Thistles bleed. All the thorn trees in Los 
Angeles County never produced a cluster of muscats. 
Jesus is simply enforcing the fact that a good thing 
cannot be begotten of a bad thing. If one finds a 
large custer of Malagas, he knows it was not plucked 
from a Canadian thistle. And if it can be shown 
that our faith yields good fruit and nothing but good 
fruit, then it must be a good thing; it must be an 
evangel. It needs must be a message of glad tidings 

(43) 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



of great joy, for otherwise, what some one has styled 
the " greatest good that ever energized humanity" 
has proceeded forth and come from an evil — which 
were a self-contradiction. 

One cannot help being drawn to these words be- 
cause of their sweet reasonableness. There is a ring 
about them that is refreshing. It cannot easily be 
imagined why any fair truth-seeker should be unwill- 
ing to have any debated question judged by this test, 
for it doth seem to be a test workable in all of life's 
movements. No art, no law, no litany, no cult, no 
implement, that cannot afford to accept this standard 
and abide by it, because of its final and essential 
fairness. A time there never was in the history of 
the world when such religious restlessness bestirred 
men's thoughts as is seen to-day; never a time when 
thinking men were calling so loudly for religious cer- 
tainty; never a time when simple ex-cathedra teach- 
ing carried such little weight. " Defender of the 
Faith" Henry the 8th called himself. * ' Defender of 
the Truth" the church aspires to be. And the one 
claim were vain and idle as the other, for ours is a 
world where only falsehood needs defense. No pro- 
tection does truth need; no buttressing. Truth can 
stand alone. Truth rejoices as a strong man to run a 
race. Defending the truth were like unto some 
Launcelot defending his sword. The best defence 
that can be made of any truth is to give it a trial. 

Recently a Brooklyn carpenter invented a bullet- 
stopping shield consisting of three plates of a chemical 
combination of cotton, wood and felt. His claims 
* were ridiculed until he made of himself a target 



WORK WITH THE WORKER: 



This is Christianity's challenge to the world. ' 'Try 
me," saith the Lord. "Come and see." 

Take an illustration from astronomy. Up to the 
seventeenth century of our era the path of the planets 
was believed to be circular. There were many facts 
which the circular theory failed to solve, and these 
increased until astronomers were perplexed. Then, 
in 1609, Kepler announced his elliptical theory. Pos- 
sibly no discovery ever created such a stir. At first 
it was ridiculed, but in a practical manner it worked. 
Difficulties it cleared away. It yielded fruit, and now 
for three hundred years — well nigh — it has never been 
doubted. 

The rule is a good one. The proper test of every- 
thing, and the only fair test, is the fruit test. It is the 
test of reason, law, government, tool, art, industry. 

Here is Christianity. What can it do in a practical 
way ? What kind of a community can it form ? What 
kind of a government can it formulate? What type 
of a man can it remake? This is the vital question. 
It thunders from the heights above, and the world is 
bound to answer it. 

I. THE REALM OF LEARNING. 

Let us look at the influence of Jesus Christ in the 
realm of learning. Nothing were more unfair than 
to speak of Christianity as hostile to the most daring 
thought. It lives upon thought, thrives by it, creates 
it. If Jesus is immortal love, He is immortal wisdom, 
too, for ' 'thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy mind." 

The story is told that, passing the college buildings 



46 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



at Cambridge one day, a cynic accosted a gentleman 
coming down the stone steps. 

' 1 And what do you manufacture here?" was the 
question. 

"Power, sir," said the gentleman, who chanced to 
be one of the professors. 

"Oh, indeed! What kind of power?" 
"Come along with me, sir." 

He took him into a room. The wall was covered 
with pictures. 

"These are some of our boys," said the professor, 
sweeping his arm. 

The cynic looked up. There was Edmund Spenser, 
John Dryden, John Milton, Thomas Gray, Coleridge, 
Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson. 
They passed into another room, and there were some 
more: Oliver Cromwell, William Pitt, Lord Palmer- 
ston, William Wilberforce, Lord Macaulay, William 
Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Abraham Cowley, George 
John Romanes. 

" See that seat there? That was Sir Isaac Newton's 
seat; the one behind Jt, Jeremy Taylor's; the one be- 
hind it, Bishop Lightfoot's." 

And yet it was Christ who made Cambridge a 
reality. It was Christ who laid the basal beams of 
Oxford and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Dublin and 
Aberdeen. It has been claimed that there are not six 
colleges in the United States to-day that were not 
established as Christian colleges. 

" I think the time is coming," said Bishop Newman, 
"when there will be a bronze statue in all our college 
halls erected to the Son of Mary, because to Him the 
college owes its life." 



WORK WITH THE WORKER; 



To-day Jesus Christ commands the world's intellect. 
He has the ear of university, congress and court. 
There is no speech nor language where His voice is not 
heard. His teaching is text, not commentary. 
Shakspere borrowed much of his raw material from 
Jesus. Milton was suckled at the breast of Bethle- 
hem. The green pastures of the New Testament color 
Dante's blood. Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is an 
exposition of Christian hope. Wordsworth takes an 
" excursion " into the fields of nature, and soaks himself 
in the New Testament he carries along. Similarly 
Coleridge and Browning; their brightness is derived 
from the great Sun that prevented them. They are 
interpreters, not revealers; satellites, not suns. The 
more they absorb of Him, the more brilliant their 
creations, as pearls increase in value by exposure to 
the glare of day. For all light is sunlight ; all learning 
is Christian learning. There is no Alpine edelweiss, 
blooming on summit cold and lonely, that is not the 
child of the sun. There could not be an iceberg 
without the sun. There could not be a Voltaire 
without a Christ. Take from Voltaire everything 
built upon the Christian idea, and the greater part of 
his ninety-seven volumes in Dalibon's edition would 
be disembowelled. Some one says that the greatest 
star is the one at the little end of the telescope. If 
that be so, then the Son of Mary must be the child 
supreme of genius, for nearly all mind stars of the 
first magnitude has He brought into vision. This 
surely must be the puzzle-lock of history — how a 
simple carpenter could make of Himself the centre of 
all culture, "focusing on Himself the light of the 
world's learning.'' 



4 8 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



How much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus? 
Where were Murillo without his Madonna? If the 
gallery were dismantled of what Christ inspired, how 
bare the walls! If the library lost what He evoked, 
how scanty the shelves! How much would remain? 
Apart from ancient classics, would anything remain? 
In the early centuries, literature was a tiny thread 
trickling from Helicon, and visited by scholars few 
and favored. Today literature is a full river, many 
branched, flowing almost entirely from the slopes of 
Calvary. 

Frederick Harrison tells us there are now two 
million volumes in the world's libraries, and that 
every ten years the press issues enough new volumes 
to make a pyramid equal to St. Paul's Cathedral. 
Mr. Gladstone, in his famous tilt with the great agnos- 
tic, asked him publicly, through the pages of the 
Fortnightly Review, if at least one million of these 
two million books was not directly traceable to the 
Christian concept, and Mr. Harrison never answered 
him. Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole 
matter, for unless this be vain talk, it doth seem 
incredible that any fair lover of truth can dispute the 
influence of Jesus Christ in the realm of intellect. 

II. THE SPHERE OF SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 

Perhaps no literary man living to-day wields a 
greater influence than Count Tolstoi. For thirty- 
five years of his life he was a nihilist, that is, a man 
who believed in nothing, a man whose mission was 
to destroy. Then ten years ago he tells us his life 
underwent a complete transformation, and in the 
preface to one of his books he pens these words: 



WORK WITH THE WORKER. 



49 



" All I have done, all I am doing, and all I hope to do 
are owing to Jesus Christ." 

Though born to luxury, with untold wealth at his 
command, and gifted with the finest literary genius, 
this lofty nobleman has put all aside and lives in the 
simplicity of a peasant, working by the side of his 
servants, that he may be true to the life and will of 
Jesus. 

Take another illustration. Who in this past cen- 
tury towers head and shoulders above every other 
heart as the highest representative of Jesus Christ in 
the world's social betterment? Most fittingly has he 
been called "that other disciple whom Jesus loved." 
Like Tolstoi, he was born to privilege and distinction; 
a money king by legacy; a member of the English 
parliament from boyhood. Surely we are not over- 
reaching in our claim that no man in the past century 
so closely fulfilled the will of Jesus. It were a sight 
for angels to witness to see this child of leisure and 
luxury, when parliament closed at midnight, turning 
his back on home and wending his way to Whitechapel 
in search of life's unfortunates. He loved music and 
the library. He loved the company of scholars and 
statesmen, but woe-alleviating was his passion. 
Forty industrial schools he founded for the poor, and 
thirty-five asylums for the homeless. All of his 
enormous income he gave away. 

The day he died he arose in the House of Lords, 
and began this speech: 

"I am now like Paul the aged. I feel the years 
telling on me. I have tried to do the will of Christ; 
but I hate to leave the world with so much misery 
behind me.". 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Then, overtaxed, he was compelled to sit down. 
That night he asked his daughter to read to him the 
twenty-third Psalm, and before she had finished he 
had passed down to the dock where the Pilot was 
awaiting him, and there on the other shore Lord 
Shaftesbury lives immortal forever. 

My dear hearers, everything in this world that is 
pure and good, Jesus Christ is at the root of it; "for 
by their fruits ye shall know them." Do we purge 
and purify the prison? We do it because He com- 
mands. Do we liberate the slave and preach deliver- 
ance to the captive? We do it because He commands. 
Do we build the hospital and heal the bruised-bodied 
and broken-hearted? We do it because He com- 
mands. Do our sons go forth from seats of learning, 
with the culture of the schools crowning them, and 
do they bury themselves in the center of the world's 
sorrows? They do it because He commands. " In- 
asmuch as ye do it to one of the least of these My 
brethern, ye do it unto Me." 

A rose-bud will blossom into a rose more rapidly if 
it is cut and placed in water than if left on the bush, 
but the cut rose bears no seed. When its leaves fall, 
all is over. Thus is it with the philanthropises and 
charities that have blossomed on the stem of Christian 
truth. Severed, they cannot perpetuate themselves. 

III. THE INDIVIDUAL AND NATION. 

But once more let us notice the fruit that Chris- 
tianity has borne in the life of the individual and the 
nation. 

In my little church out West I had two elders. One 
was an old officer in the army. All his life he had 



WORK WITH THE WORKER. 



5* 



lived among the Indians, that is, the part of his 
life he was not in jail, for he had spent six years of it 
in the penitentiary. He was what you would call by 
nature a rough, shaggy, iron old man. Up to twenty- 
five years of age he was a desperado of the Jesse 
James type, rifling stores, robbing banks, blowing up 
safes and holding up trains. Rumor had it that he 
had killed more than one man in his day, but of that 
he was always silent. 

Then he met the power of God and was converted, 
and of his conversion I have no more doubt than of 
the apostle Paul's. He married late in life, and God 
had blessed him with a boy. And how he loved that 
boy ! How he dreaded that some day he might follow 
in his father's footsteps ! To see that big great brawny 
soldier, with an arm of steel and hand like an 
anvil, to see him go home and play the baby, was 
something like the magwey tree of Mexico which 
shoots up its tall, homely, thorny trunk like a tele- 
graph pole, then crowns itself with a perfect wreath of 
flowers. There is in geology a stone called the geode, 
a coarse bit of rock to look at, but split it open, and 
lo! a marvel. There flash before you grottos and 
crystals and wreaths and plumes and exquisite beauty. 
He was a human geode. To hear that old man talk 
in prayer meeting! Ah, he had been through the fire. 

"Just to think that God has saved a wretch like 
me," he would say. 

Then to hear him pray! The penitence, the peace, 
the gratitude. The softness of childhood, the fresh- 
ness of spring, were in his soul. I heard him pray one 
hundred times possibly, and never a prayer but had 
this sentence : 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



''How shall I ever thank Thee, Lord, for rescuing 
a poor wretch like me!" 

Dr. Dixon tells the story of a poor little African boy 
who was sold into slavery years ago. He was carried 
to the coast, and after a -varied experience found 
himself at work in a store at Lagos. He was thence 
shipped to America with other slaves. The vessel 
was captured by an English cruiser, and carried its 
human cargo to Sierra Leone, where they were set free. 

The boy received an education in a mission school. 
He was baptized in 1825 at the age of eighteen, and 
returned as a student and became a teacher in the 
Fourah Bay College. He was consecrated the first 
bishop of the Niger in Canterbury Cathedral. The 
University at the same time made him a doctor of 
divinity. He died in Lagos, December, 1891, a re- 
spected, scholarly man of God. 

In his diary he describes a meeting with his savage 
mother, after being made bishop. He accidentally 
met her in the market place one day after a separation 
of twenty-five years. He says : 

"When she saw me, she trembled. We looked at 
each other in silence. Big tears ran down her savage 
face. She called me by my name, and kissed me." 

Oh, the perpetual miracle of humanity! From a 
poor, ignorant savage heathen woman sprang the 
bishop of the Niger. That noble man of God spring- 
ing from such an environment! "Believe me for 
Bishop Yulang's sake. By their fruits ye shall know 
them." 

Oh, it is a magnificent thing today to be a Christian. 
It is to belong to that great army that is enriching 
knowledge, abolishing slavery, ameliorating war, un- 



WORK WITH THE WORKER. 



53 



shackling fetters, elevating man. A diamond in the 
dark is dark. It is not fair to the diamond to judge 
it in the dark. A diamond has a right to be judged 
in the light. A picture has a right to be judged in 
the best light. Let us give Christianity at least the 
benefit of daylight. Why will men sweep all the dust 
into the air and then say there is no dust ? Confucius 
has had China in his grip for 2,400 years, and there 
is China today. Behold her! Behold her! The 
• works of Christ are still wrought. His miracles are 
still here. Believe me for Formosa's sake. Believe 
me for Uganda's sake. For unbelief is ice. Unbelief 
is frost. Unbelief is superstition. Unbelief lives in 
the fog, in the chill. Christianity is literature, poetry, 
science, art, music, jurisprudence, inventiveness, faith, 
hope, love, heaven, home, Christ. 



CHAPTER IV. 



HARMONY WITH ENVIRONMENT. 

"Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee." Psalm 79:11. 
" Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." Zechariah 9 :12. 

Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field has an interesting chapter 
in one of his books on his visit to Tangiers. Tangiers 
is a little town on the northern coast of Africa, famous 
for its prison, which has been called the "African 
chamber of horrors. " It is quite a considerable 
building. The governor lives in one end, the pris- 
oners in the other. The prison building itself consists 
of two rooms, one for the city and one for the country. 
Here the poor creatures are huddled together like 
cattle, some afflicted with leprosy, some with insanity, 
every known incurable disease being represented; 
while the desperadoes are hand-cuffed and chained 
around the ankles to the walls. None are compelled 
to work. In our penitentiaries we make the inmates 
work, but there they starve them; for that is their 
punishment — starvation slow but certain. 

Sabbath morning came, and Dr. Field went to the 
governor and asked permission to give the poor 
wretches something to eat. The governor consenting, 
he sent a man to the market to purchase a wagon-load 
of bread. The loaves were carried out and laid on the 
floor outside the iron grating; then going round they 
distributed one loaf to each through the iron bars. 

What a spectacle it must have been! "They 
snatched their share like greedy wolves," says Dr. 

(54) 



ENVIRONMENT. 



55 



Field. One poor leper took a huge bite out of his, 
thrust the remainder under his rags, and pressed it to # 
his bosom. More like unto dumb, driven cattle they 
seemed than human beings made in our heavenly 
Father's image. Not one of them spoke, not one 
thanked him, not one even smiled. 

When I read that story as only Dr. Field can tell it, I 
felt my very flesh creep ; and when he gave it a 
religious turn and spoke of the millions of spiritual 
prisoners in the world to-day, who are living without 
hope, and without God — starving for the Bread of 
heaven and the loaf of life and love, chained to the 
walls of superstition and darkness — I thought I never 
heard or read a stronger plea. I thought a stronger 
plea could not be made for the great enduring problem 
of the heathen and unbelieving world. 

Life is filled with prisoners, prisoners of hope, some 
of them; prisoners of despair, some; prisoners of the 
body; prisoners of the soul. If liberty is harmony 
with one's environment, slavery is rebellion against 
such environment; and many are the souls in bond- 
age. Hegel declared that the great fact of history is 
the struggle for freedom. "When I am dead," said 
one of the greatest of modern poets, "lay a sword on 
my coffin, for I was a soldier in the war for the libera- 
tion of humanity. ' ' 

We are all locked up, more or less, within walls of 
limitation and restriction. Dr. Hillis speaks of the 
prisoners of physical misfortune, the prisoners of 
misrepresentation and abuse, and the prisoners of 
unfilled ambitions; and doubtless these are a great 
army. 



56 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



PHYSICAL MISFORTUNE. 

Here are Robert Hall, and Richard Baxter, and 
Douglass Jerrold. Witness Florence Nightingale shut 
up in a sick room the greater part of her life; truly 
that room became her prison, and she a caged eagle. 
Witness Edward Payson, William Wilberforce, and 
Robert Murray McCheyne, nicknamed "the skele- 
ton, " who put the trumpet of the gospel to his con- 
sumptive lips for eight brief years, and fell on death 
at twenty-nine. Here is Alexander H. Stevens, who 
knew not a well day for over fifty years, weighing 
only eighty-five pounds; first using a cane, then a 
crutch, then two crutches, then an invalid's chair, in 
which he was wheeled into the hall of congress, and the 
chamber of senate, and the governor's mansion. 
Verily, his body was a cage against whose fleshly bars 
the soul was ever fretting for flight and freedom. 

At twenty, John Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson 
detected a line of bright scarlet in their phlegm, and 
each knew that the die had been cast. Each saw the 
temple of fame inviting them onward and upward, and 
ventured to set foot therein, but ill-health stood lion- 
like in the path and disputed every inch of the climb. 
One night, just as he was retiring, Keats coughed upon 
the pillow-slip, and said to his friend: 

" Brown, bring me the candle and let me see this. " 

After regarding it steadfastly he fell back calmly, 
saying: 

" I know the color; it is arterial; that is my death- 
warrant. " 

He survived twelve months, but it was a life in 
death. Surely no youth can read the story of how 
these knights of the new chivalry fought hemorrhage 



ENVIRONMENT. 



and pulmonary attack and poverty, and held dissolu- 
tion at bay, without a tear of sympathy stealing into 
the eye and a note of gratitude into the heart. 

For ten years Stevenson expected to die at any 
moment. The year before his death he wrote these 
words : 

"For fourteen years I have not had a day's real 
health ; I have wakened sick, and gone to bed weary ; 
and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have 
written in bed and out of it, written in hemorrhages, 
written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written 
when my head swam for weakness ; and for so long, it 
seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my 
glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, 
since first I came to the Pacific ; and still, few are the 
days when I am not in some physical distress. And 
the battle goes on — ill or well is a trifle; so as it goes. 
I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so 
willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, 
inglorious one of the bed and the physic-bottle. At 
least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a 
place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. " 

MISREPRESENTATION AND ABUSE. 

Others there are who are prisoners of misrepresenta- 
tion and abuse. The story of Joseph, of Daniel, of 
Galileo, of John Locke, of William Lloyd Garrison, of 
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are ever- 
fresh illustrations of the ingratitude and injustice of 
the human heart, of great gifts rejected and cast aside, 
of unselfish service disowned. 

Dante was banished from Florence as a dangerous 
citizen, but that same city, not. many years later, 



58 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



begged for his ashes and the honor of entombing his 
remains. "Surely no great man ever ate his bread 
wet with tears of greater bitterness than did the 
author of the Divine Comedy. " 

Savonarola is strangled and burned in the market- 
place to-day at the instance of the pope. To-morrow, 
Michael Angelo is instructed to paint his portrait for 
the walls of the Vatican, as one of the sainted doctors 
of the church. 

Perhaps man's inhumanity to man was never more 
strikingly illustrated than in the story of Firdausi, the 
great epic poet of Persia. How sore that life must 
have been through jealousy and treachery! For 
thirty years he sang his country's praise in many a 
noble number, for the which he received in his white- 
haired old age, at the hands of his fellow-citizens, 
banishment and exile. And the crowning touch of 
pathos is at the close, when one hundred thousand 
pieces of gold were brought to him in reparation for 
a the wrong that had been done. As the camels bearing 
the treasure entered one of the gates of the city, 
Firdausi's dead body was being reverently borne by a 
group of strangers to its last resting place through 
another. 

Jeremiah was one of the greatest of Hebrew 
prophets. He predicted the downfall of the theocracy 
and advised voluntary submission as' the only means 
of escaping complete destruction; for which he was 
cast into a dungeon. After being set free, he was 
forced by the people to accompany them to Egypt, 
although he had advised against the expedition, as 
displeasing to God, and in Egypt they stoned him to 
death. It is interesting to read how after death he 



ENVIRONMENT. 



59. 



was turned into a hero, how his words were studied 
and memorized by his fellow-countrymen in exile, and 
how he came to be regarded as the prophet who 
should reappear again. 

For some strange reason a prophet hath no honor in 
his own country. It seems as if great hearts must 
be unappreciated while living, else have their great- 
ness first recognized in some foreign land. Nations 
seem to prefer postponing their gratitude to earth's 
wisest teachers, keenest seers, and sweetest singers, 
till the hero is beyond reach of sight or hearing, till the 
hand, alas! is vanished, and the voice is still. The 
history of all reform seems to be the old story of some 
leader vilified in life, deified in death. Verily, the 
prisoners of misrepresentation and abuse are a great 
number. 

DISAPPOINTED HOPES. 

A great multitude, too, are the prisoners of dis- 
appointed hopes. 

That hymn of Mrs. Steele's was born out of pain. 
Such perfect lines could only come forth from the 
fiery furnace. The authoress met with an accident in 
childhood which made of her a life-long invalid. 
Engaged to be married to a gentleman whom she 
dearly loved, and awaiting his arrival on the eve of 
her bridal morn, a messenger came with the sad news 
that he had been drowned. Prostrated, she retired to 
her prison-chamber, and penned the lines : 

" Father, whate'er of earthly bliss 
Thy sovereign will denies, 
Accepted at Thy throne of grace 
Let this petition rise: 



6o HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Give me a calm, a thankful heart 

From every murmur free; 
The blessings of Thy grace impart, 

And let me live to Thee. 

Let the sweet hope that Thou art mine 

My path of life attend; 
Thy presence through my journey shine, 

And bless its happy end. " 

Some are hedged in by circumstances; others are 
grappling with their evil star; while many lose heart 
for want of breathing room. How pitiable to witness 
anything over-large for its place! Goethe says: 4 'If 
you put an oak tree in a jardiniere, either the jardi- 
niere will break or the oak must die." In his dun- 
geon in London tower, Sir Walter Raleigh could pace 
but twice his length, and thousands there are to whom 
their environment says : " You shall not live your best ; 
you have no room to swing your arms, no room to 
swing your heart. " Like ships are they aground and 
helpless for lack of water depth. 

One of Maupassant's short stories is called "The 
Necklace. " It treats of a young wife who suffered 
keenly, feeling herself born for luxury and high life. 
The poverty of her home hurt her — the worn-out 
chairs, the faded curtains, the bare walls. When she 
sat down with her husband to their modest fare, she 
dreamed of silverware and tapestry, delicious dishes, 
the pink flesh of trout and wing of quail. She felt 
herself a caged prisoner. Alas, how many such there 
are in life — prisoners of unfulfilled ambitions. 

Here is an old college friend. Many a happy hour 
we spent together. We graduated together. His an 
intellect as keen and clear and bracing as a frosty, 



ENVIRONMENT. 



61 



moonlight sleigh-ride in a northern winter. His, too? 
a tall, stately figure with the face of an Apollo — lofty 
in thought, noble in spirit, spotless in character. 
Splendid are the visions of which he dreams, but the 
seeds of death are in his lungs, and he is poor. His 
truly is a soul in fetters — "looking before and after, 
and pining for what is not. " 

And time would fail to tell of the prisoners of pros- 
perity, for they, too, are a great multitude. Strange 
that prosperity should tend so to incage the soul, but 
the facts are unmistakable. Prosperity is a test that 
few can stand. Some men cannot succeed because 
they lack capacity for leadership. As long as they 
are fighting in the ranks they do unselfish, heroic 
service ; but placed in command they lose ' brain- 
steadiness, and grow dizzy. Benedict Arnold was for 
many years a patriot above reproach. No better 
soldier through those long Ontario marches than he. 
But when British gold glittered before his eyes, he lost 
his poise and fell. Verily, to climb high up the ladder 
of distinction without losing balance, that is the task 
for all that man hath of strength and fortitude. 

Strange that prosperity can so easily belittle; 
strange that it can so readily enslave ! Some things in 
this world are dangerous to possess, because of their 
tendency to possess us. "Many a man going up the 
hill of prosperity meets his soul coming down." A 
few there are who have sensed the danger and taken 
warning. Witness, the late Samuel Appleton. He 
was becoming very wealthy. He had a ship at sea, 
uninsured. She was many days over-due, and he 
was growing anxious and worried. One night, ner- 
vous and sleepless, he arose, saying to his soul: 



62 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



• " Soul, this must not be. " 

He took his pen, estimated the value of ship and 
cargo, wrote out a check for the amount to some 
benevolence — without knowing whether or not it 
would ever arrive. Thus did he assert his freedom. 

Balzac has a story in three books, called the " Magic* 
Skin. " It opens with a young Paris student, Raphael 
by name, entering a gambling nest of human vipers 
one afternoon, throwing down his last gold napoleon 
with a chink, and losing; then, dazed, walking out as 
in a vertigo, thinking only of the five-franc piece 
which the prefect of the Seine would pay to the boat- 
man as the price of his body. Passing the shop of an 
old, fleshless antiquary, who had seen the storms of 
102 winters, he turned in and asked permission to 
look over the curios ; for he was questioning himself if 
darkness were not the better time to die, which were 
in truth an effort to gain courage. There were porce- 
lain plates, ivory dishes, mummies, jewel cases, ara- 
besques, miniatures, carved shrines, panoplies, vases 
of Egyptian porphyry, a vast bazaar of ancient relics, 
and an ass' skin, very much like that of a fox, on 
which was written in Arabic : 

"Dost thou desire me? Take me. 
God will grant thee thy wishes. 
But at every wish of thine I shrink, 
And with me thy days." 

"Take it," said the old man; "you are welcome; 
only once taken you can never get rid of it. Every 
wish it will gain for thee, but with the fulfillment of 
every desire it will shrink, and with it thy days. Any 
desire thou mayest have, but at the cost, of thy life. " 

The young man signed the compact, seized the 



ENVIRONMENT. 



63 



leather, rolled it into the pocket of his coat and 
rushed out. 

His first thought was to plunge into some wild orgy. 
So to the banqueting hall he turned, where the wealth 
and culture of Paris made midnight tumultuous. 
The tables were white as snow new-fallen; the cut 
glass shed prismatic colors in its starry reflection ; the 
viands served upon golden dishes sharpened curiosity 
and appetite; claret, burgundy and madeira flowed in 
regal profusion. By the time the last course was 
served, all the guests were wallowing in the delights of 
that limbo "where the lamps of the mind go out, 
where the fires of the body are kindled, where the 
passions are delivered over unto the delicious joys of 
liberty. " The ladies, beautiful and bejeweled, stag- 
gered from the table. Passionate eyes glared like the 
beads of a reptile. 

And now the guests were gathered in the parlors. 
Groups were formed. Revelry rose like the pande- 
monium of Milton. The air grew hotter and hotter 
with wine and wassail, till soon each victim fell over in 
sickening self -helplessness. Gradually the candela- 
bras burned low, flickered and went out. Night now 
wrapt its black crape around the hideous spectacle. 
Silence reigned — an awful silence. At noon next day 
the guests began to stir, stiff in limb, sore in body. 
The women, whose elegantly arranged tresses were 
dishevelled, and whose dresses were disordered by the 
tossings of a cramped sleep, presented a picture 
repulsive to the freshness of dawn. Sobered eyes 
were dulled by lassitude. Each haggard face read the 
confusion. Like flowers crushed in the street they 
seemed, after the passing of the tournament. "It 



64 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



was the awakening of Vice, when excess with strong 
hand has squeezed the wine from the grape of life and 
left only the peeling and the refuse. " 

Raphael leaped up, as if startled by some bullet- 
wound. He felt for the magic skin, and a cold chill 
crept over his flesh when he saw that it had shrivelled. 

The next book is called "The Woman Without a 
Heart." Her name is Fedora, and she represents 
modern society. A young woman of twenty-two, 
beautiful, fabulously rich, with all Paris at her feet. 

Raphael falls in love with Fedora. To win her 
was life's one ambition. Her heart was the last 
ticket in his fortune's lottery. Then follow the ins and 
outs of this strange love episode — a passage, no doubt, 
from Balzac's own autobiography. A young man 
was he of marked intellectual gifts, but born to bit- 
terest poverty, living in a garret, and yet seeking to 
win the heart of a woman that lived for glitter and 
dazzle and bubble and affectation and parade and 
pomp and show — a woman without a heart. 

Fedora inoculated Raphael with the leprosy of her 
vanity. Deeper and deeper into debt he fell; deeper 
and deeper into despair. 

"To the devil with death," he exclaimed, one day, 
brandishing the magic skin, "I choose to live, to be 
rich, to win Fedora. Never will she be won till I am 
rich. I wish for 200,000 francs a year, must have it, 
200,000 a year! Then shall I break her heart. " 

One night at a feast a notary entered. 

" Is there one Raphael de Valentine here? " he asked. 

" Your pleasure, Monsieur? " 

" I bring you six million francs, sir from the death of 
your uncle. " 



ENVIRONMENT. 



65 



A storm of cheers from his boon revelers made the 
dishes rattle. Raphael took out the magic skin, 
spread it open upon the table. A dreadful pallor 
defined every muscle in his haggard face. He took a 
pair of compasses and measured it. He felt the steel 
of a knife cutting through his flesh when he saw that 
the leather was smaller. Three times he looked at 
the talisman. Three times he flushed and paled. 
Was it not the image of his being? He could gratify 
any sensual enjoyment, but at the cost of his life. 

In the last book Raphael endeavors to destroy the 
fatal leather. He who started out with suicide as a 
goal now desires life with an intense and awful long- 
ing. He turns to life's wise teachers, but they could 
not fathom it. The mechanic strove to annihilate it 
by violence, the chemist by reagents. Into a white- 
hot furnace they thrust it, but it came out unsinged. 
They subjected it to the full force of a voltaic battery, 
but without avail. He knew, for had not the old 
antiquary told him that whoso signed the compact 
was thereby committed to the end, and could no 
more repent and return than could a man repent and 
return who should throw himself from the pinnacle of 
some Eiffel tower. 

One day he hurled it into the bottom of the well, 
and plunged that night into some wild orgy. Next 
morning the gardener brought it in, to show it to his 
master. 

" In drawing a bucket of water, monsieur, I brought 
up this strange marine plant, and although it lives in 
the water it is as dry as a fungus." 

So saying, the man handed Raphael the inexorable 
skin, now reduced to six square inches. 



66 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



" Great God," he cried, measuring it, "I have but 
two months to live. All the delights of life are danc- 
ing like beautiful women around my dying bed. If I 
call to them I die, for every wish is suicidal/ ' 

And now Raphael realizes the inevitable, and des- 
pairingly returns homeward to face death. He retires 
from the world, closets himself in seclusion, and strives 
to live a vegetable life — to strip his soul of every wish 
and all the glories of desire. But a long career of 
self-indulgence has weakened his will-power, and the 
gratification of his lower passions masters him. Ex- 
cess has enervated and unnerved him. He is a pris- 
oner to his passions. There hangs the magic talisman 
upon the wall, fastened to a white cloth on which its 
dreadful outline was accurately marked. 

Four physicians now attended him. and soothed his 
wasted body with opiates. That dry, sepulchral 
cough bespoke strange murmurings of disease. He 
saw it shrink gradually to the dimensions of a vinca 
leaf ; and as the strangling death rattle proclaimed the 
end, the last morsel of the skin melted into nothing- 
ness, and was gone. 

Beloved, we have given a brief of this awful allegory 
in much of the novelist's own words. Do you recog- 
nize the types? The magic skin is the undisciplined 
desire for worldly success, indulgence in which 
shortens life by exhausting the nervous energy. Have 
you not seen men devoting themselves to the posses- 
sion of some prize, and finding, when the prize was 
won, that they were no longer capable of deriving 
pleasure from it? Have you not seen men grow rich 
and at the same time losing the power to enjoy their 
riches? Do you remember, in Greek mythology* the 



ENVIRONMENT. 



67 



story of Tantalus, from which our word "tantalize" 
is derived? Do you recall the punishment the gods 
meted out to him in the lower world? He stood up 
to his neck in water, which fled from him when he 
tried to drink it, and over his head hung fruits rich 
and rare, which the wind wafted when he tried to 
grasp them. Are we not having that scene enacted 
before our eyes every day? There are men who can 
adorn the walls of their homes with any number of 
beautiful pictures, but who cannot appreciate them; 
men whose library is filled with the choicest books, 
but do not care to open one, unless it is a cash book. 
Have you not seen such men? 

Some years ago George William Curtis published a 
volume called " Prue and I." There is a chapter in it 
entitled Mr. Tidbottom's spectacles. The magical 
quality of these glasses was that when their owner 
looked at any one through them he saw the real man. 
He looked at one man and saw a ledger, at another 
and saw a champagne bottle. 

There is an old proverb which says: "It is not 
worth while to kill yourself to keep yourself." How 
many are doing just that! How many are losing the 
higher life in grasping the endeavor to gain the lower 
life! King James, learning of the poverty of Ben 
Jonson, sent him five shillings. Jonson said to the 
messenger : 

"The king sends me five shillings because I live in 
an alley; tell him his soul lives in an alley." 

We do not admire the ingratitude of Jonson or his 
unkind reply, but the lesson is plain : it is possible for 
the life to enlarge and at the same time for the real 
man to shrink ; it is possible to augment a fortune and 



68 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



to diminish a man. Prosperity should be a life pre- 
server; alas, full oft it is a life destroyer! 

PRISONERS OF JESUS CHRIST. 

But if the prisoners of adversity are ever with us, 
and the prisoners of prosperity are a large and increas- 
ing number, let us hasten, in conclusion, to take note 
of that considerable and growing circle who are the 
slaves of the higher life. These are that choice company 
of select children who pride themselves in being called 
the prisoners of Jesus Christ. 

Such was the great apostle to the Gentiles. His 
favorite introduction of himself is: "I, the prisoner 
of Jesus Christ " ; his favorite title, " doulos.' 9 He was 
a slave, and he gloried in it. " For from henceforth 
let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus. " 

I have a friend with whom I spent many happy 
years in college, and at the time of his graduation he 
offered himself for missionary work in Africa. His 
was a tall, handsome, personable physique, turning 
the scale at 230 pounds. He would enter the football 
field as captain of our college eleven, and not a man 
but looked up to him as far and away, in every line, 
the first athlete on the gridiron. For three years he 
was pitcher on the Varsity nine. He would enter the 
examination hall, and when the marks were 
announced he was at the top of his class, not in 
one subject alone, but in all. At the time of his 
graduation, he received the gold medal, and the 
honor of being the only man in the history of the 
institution that ever came out first in every depart- 
ment of study. But he "sacrificed" a brilliant intel- 



ENVIRONMANT. 



69 



lect and a great muscle for Christ. He went to 
Africa. 

Pray, dear reader, what sent him thither? Was it 
gold? Indeed to some of us who knew him best it 
seemed as if all the wealth of Pierpont Morgan would 
not avail to keep him home, so determined was he. 
Was fame the enticement? Never will he be known. 
What power, then, could it have been that drew him 
from a lovely home and a lovely mother and two 
lovely sisters to a place so uninviting? Ah, it was 
the power of the cross, the slavery of Jesus — the same 
slavery that sent Livingstone to Africa, and Duff to 
India, and MacKay to Formosa, and Patteson to 
Melanesia. 

" Were the whole realm of nature mine, 
That were a present far too small; 
Love so amazing, so divine, 

Demands my soul, my life, my all." 

To all of life's captive children come the glad news 
that the truth can make us free. " Is not this the fast 
that I have chosen, " saith the Lord, "to loose the 
bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and 
to let the oppressed go free?" Christ is the fountain 
of all freedom. He is a door to those in custody; 
wings is He to the cast-down in soul, hope to the 
disquieted. He is health to the broken-hearted, 
deliverance to the captives, liberty to the bruised. 
He unshackles fetters. He emancipates serfs. Come 
into His service, dear reader.' Come voluntarily, 
cheerfully, gladly. Disobedience and resistance are 
bondage. The willing slavery of the best is liberty. 
"In tune with the infinite" is liberty. "Life," says 
Dr. Vandyke, "is self-change to meet environment. " 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Is thine a weak body? Consecrate it to Him, and thy 
very weakness will be made strength. Art thou 
hampered by circumstance, and cast down by 
adversity and ingratitude? Know that to those who 
love God, who are the called according to His purpose, 
all things work together for good. Is prosperity at 
thy disposal? Watch and pray, lest it enthrall thee. 
Surrender thine all to Him, a living sacrifice — body, 
soul, spirit, time, talent, wealth, business cares, influ- 
ence, duty, labor, home, wife, child. Be transformed 
by the renewing of thy mind.' Thus wilt thou find 
that perfect slavery which is perfect freedom, as thou 
dost prove what is that good, and acceptable, and 
perfect will of God. 



CHAPTER V. 



HARMONY THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 
"Come and see." John 1:46. 

These words are wholesome. They are frank, open 
and above board. The Gospel courts inspection. 
Take your sledge and sound every stone in the build- 
ing. No room in the temple is locked. Knock, and it 
shall be opened. Free is the holy of holies to all. 
Personal experience is the vital note. 

The Christian religion has everything to gain from 
thorough probing. It has no favors to ask; all its 
favors are gifts. It submits itself to the test of 
science. It asks men to think and prove. It places 
us on the hills ; yonder is the north and the south, the 
east and the west. It wishes nothing secreted. It is 
for the daylight and the uplands. Let there be no 
political wire-pulling, or slating or doctoring in the 
dark. Let nothing be done in a corner. Let the 
examination be merciless and thorough. Let the 
whole truth be told. Search, sift, satisfy, question, 
cross-question. Neglect not hammer and scalpel and 
retort and reagent and electric coil and vernier. If 
the investigation be open, and accurate, and honest, 
and healthy, and keen, there is no doubt of the verdict. 

Never was there such heart-hunger for truth as 
to-day; never did the world ask such questions, and 
so many; never was age so interrogative, never such a 
cry for evidence. Is it a healthy sign? Surely. 
Inquiry must not be crushed, but courted rather, 

(71) 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



" If my faith is false, " said Bishop Berkeley, " 1 want 
to know it; I want to know it now." The hope 
immortal must not rest on what is perishable. The 
Bible is a book that welcomes the strongest light that 
lens can focus. There is nothing close or stifling in the 
temple of revealed truth — no bad ventilation. Its 
windows are open. The air is pure. Walking 
through it one feels as if he were inhaling a breeze 
from the mountain, a whiff from the ocean. 

Jesus trusts His message to a world of thinking 
men. Here it is in the open. There is no cloud, no 
concealment. It has no mysterious esoteric pass- 
word. It learns every language, sets its foot on every 
silver shore; "its wings were made to flap in the 
firmament. " Such faith has our Lord in the inde- 
structibility of what He came to teach, that He 
charged His followers to proclaim it from the house- 
top. 

With this thought uppermost, let us hasten to the 
text before us. "Philip saith unto Nathaniel, Come 
and see"; and for memory-support let us move 
along two lines : 

I. Come and see. 

II. Come and see Jesus. 

I. — COME AND SEE. 

. Nathaniel could not believe that the Messiah had 
come from Nazareth; but a little out-of-the-way 
hamlet up in the highlands was Nazareth. 

" Very well, " Philip says, " come with me. Do not 
make up your mind until you see. Do not criticise 
first, and then come. Come first, and then criticise. " 

Surely that is fair; verily that would be accepted by 



EXPERIENCE. 



73 



any American jury. Christianity is the most reason- 
able proposal that was ever presented to a thinking 
world. Never does it drive, but draw; never does it 
compel assent, but rather coax inquiry; it can be 
tested. For certainty can be had on religious matters 
as on scientific matters. Not all experimenting is 
monopolized by the chemist. The soul, too, can 
handle his tools with advantage. "0 taste and see 
that the Lord is good. " Nothing is more convincing 
than the sense of taste. If a babe has once tasted 
honey, all the nurses in town cannot persuade its little 
tongue that it is not sweet. If you take a piece of 
gold to the jeweller he applies the test of acid; should 
the acid leave a stain, the claim of pure gold is falsified. 

Some years ago there was a discussion in the press 
as to the benefits of vaccination; it is not a question 
for argument, but for statistics. A few years ago a 
Frenchman, Mesmer by name, discovered what he 
called mesmerism. It was scoffed at by the wise as 
deception; but a committee of investigation was 
appointed, and they reported favorably. Thus, and 
in many ways, it may be seen that a large percentage 
of questions in this world is experimental. 

One may be a greater chemist than Faraday and a 
greater reasoner than William Pitt, but he cannot tell 
by mere reasoning whether a precipitate will be 
formed by adding ammonia to mercuric chloride ; it is 
a question, not of reasoning but of seeing. Dr. 
Lardner, an eminent mathematician in the university 
of Oxford, wrote an article for Blackwood's Magazine, 
proving that no steamship could ever cross the 
Atlantic; but the steamer "Sirius, " only a few 
months later brought that article to America, He 



74 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



also staked his repute as a man of science before the 
# House of Commons that no railway train could ever go 
faster than ten miles an hour. Again it was a ques- 
tion, not of reasoning but of seeing. We have not yet 
forgotten that eminent engineer who once declared 
that no bridge could ever be built across the Missis- 
sippi; and we remember, too, that Babinet, the 
French calculator, asserted that the idea of trans- 
mitting a telegram from Queenstown to New York 
was childish. Is it not recorded in the life of Comte, 
that the great philosopher advised his followers to 
cease attempting to find out anything about the fixed 
stars, because such knowledge was forever beyond the 
reach of man? And does not the same historian tell 
us that before he had been dead ten years the spectro- 
scope was discovered ? And now our knowledge of the 
fixed stars is respectably considerable. The dark 
valleys and mountain peaks on Mars cannot be rea- 
soned out; they must be seen. The monks of four 
hundred years ago might have beheld Jupiter's 
moons, had they only been willing to condescend and 
look through Galileo's telescope. Ours is a universe 
where stars crowd into the sky-ceiling in proportion as 
the eye is assisted and made far-sighted. 

There is what is called the " cushion of the sea.'* 
Down beneath the agitated surface there is a part that 
is never stirred, peaceful as a vault. Formerly it was 
believed there was no life down there. Learnedly and 
m conclusively did each, Thompson and Tyndall, prove 
that the tremendous pressure and absence of light 
made life at certain depths impossible. In the year 
1880 the ship " Challenger' ' dropped Brooke's sound- 
ing weight five miles deep in the Indian Ocean. The 



EXPERIENCE. 



75 



valve of the weight was opened and closed, and some 
of the dredgings brought to the surface. When 
Prof. Bailey examined it, little marine insects were 
uncovered. Diatoms he named them, and assigned 
them to the vegetable world. Once more it was a 
question, not of reasoning, but of seeing. 

It is personal experience and sensuous perception 
that carries with it the logic unanswerable. What 
cared the man born blind that the Pharisees rejected 
Jesus? He knew He had made him to see. What 
cared Galileo for deductions against the motions of 
the earth when he pointed his newly constructed glass 
to those million jewels that blaze on the brow of night ? 
What cared Fulton for the laughs and jeers of his 
cynical countrymen when he proposed to take a party 
up the Hudson on the " Clermont " ? " The thing will 
burst," says one; "it'll burn up," another cries; 
"they'll all be drowned," exclaimed a third; "put 
Fulton and his folly in the asylum," shouted the 
multitudes that lined the banks. The great inventor 
simply smiled and said: "Wait and see." Then the 
paddle wheels began to turn. 

THE BEST PROOF. 

Suppose you deny the saving power of Christ's 
blood to a man who is a living witness of that power; 
what then? Is not the best proof that which needs 
no proof? Self-evidence cannot be proved; it is its 
own proof. When Mozart walked out into the fresh- 
ness of the morning air and listened to the lark, he did 
not feel like dissecting it to find the music. 

"Sing on, sweet messenger," the great composer 
said; "sing on, sing on." 



76 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



When Rosetti once plucked a rose he did not shake 
its petals in the dust to find the beauty. 

" Let the little diamond blow and blush,' ' the poet- 
painter thought; "by this I know the rose is beautiful, 
and that there is better beauty in the heart of God." 

I do not wish to analyze my mother's love; I would 
rather feel it. It were difficult to prove in syllogism 
convincing that a parent loves its child, put what no 
syllogism can state the heart knows. I do not under- 
stand the exact relationship of Christ to the everlast- 
ing Father; I have not mastered the metaphysical 
analysis of His matchless character; I would much 
rather just see Christ; and as Lord Byron had himself 
shut up all night in a dungeon in Venice that he might 
have a truer appreciation of the life of the prisoners 
and the joy of his own life of freedom, so I would shut 
myself up in the quiet of my own closet and on bended 
knee come face to face with my personal Saviour, that 
I might have a truer conception of the slavery and 
hideousness and enormity of my sins, and the glorious 
liberty of the life to which He calls me. 

But ever mindful let us be that the tests of truth 
are multiform and various. Corn calls for a Fair- 
banks, timber for a foot rule. We approach harmony 
with the eye, and melody with the ear, beauty with 
the taste, and duty with the conscience. The star 
requires a telescope; the bacillus a microscope; but 
the 4 'heart is the window through which we see 
heavenly things.' * No Gladstone would take a tape 
measure to see how far aloft Homer's thought ran,' 
nor a steel-yard to weigh the heavy syllogisms of 
Bishop Butler. You cannot sweep up sunshine with 
a broom, nor raise doubts with a derrick. A great 



EXPERIENCE. 



77 



cartoonist makes us smile by sketching some hod- 
carrier as he examines a Turner masterpiece with his 
penknife. It is as absurd to go to physical science 
for the proof of Scripture as to consult solid geometry 
for information on Bright's disease. Natural things 
are naturally discerned; supernatural things, super- 
naturally. 

Just here let us pause to add, in passing, that 
patient lovers of truth have been imposed on by the 
unreasonableness of men who imagine that scientific 
eminence entitles them to weigh Christianity; and 
because they are experts with the electric coil and 
scalpel, that they are, therefore, necessarily experts 
in everything else. When John Locke's famous blind 
man was once asked what scarlet was like, he an- 
swered, ■ ' Like the sound of a trumpet"; when asked 
what blue was like he answered, "Like the tones of 
a flute." Not much more considerable was Sir 
Robert Peel's estimate of Tennyson's poetry when 
he offered the laureate a pension, confessing at the 
time that he had never read a line of his writings. 

Within his own province we admit the right of every 
man to speak with note commanding. Here, for in- 
stance, is some Audubon who has devoted all his life 
to the study of birds. On that subject let us hasten 
to kneel to his authority ; let us accept with becoming 
modesty the deep results of his research. But herein 
lies the danger of specialism. Our expert ornithol- 
ogist becomes ambitious to dogmatize in some field 
where he is not an authority, not even a fair judge. 
Think of some Beecher writing a treatise on juris- 
prudence, crossing swords with Blackstone! Think 
of Mr. Darwin writing a commentary on Shakspere! 



78 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Does not the story go on to tell us that one evening, 
picking up Hamlet, the great naturalist found it so 
dull as to drop into slumber? Think of Sir Isaac 
Newton writing an introduction to ' ' Paradise Lost"! 
Once upon a time did he not read it and ask contempt- 
uously at the close: "What does it all prove?" A 
beautiful concept meant nothing to Sir Isaac, unless 
it proved something; surely he forgot that his mother's 
love was beyond the carnal grip of proof. Think of 
Mr. Huxley publishing a volume of lay sermons on 
the Gospel of John! Now, Mr. Huxley was a prince 
among scientists, and Mr. Beecher was a king among 
preachers ; but the legal brotherhood respectfully de- 
cline to take Mr. Beecher as their authority on juris- 
prudence, and surely the church cannot be accused of 
any extreme narrowness if she declines Mr. Huxley as 
her prophet on religion. 

II. COME AND SEE JESUS. 

But the third little monosyllable of our text is a 
transitive verb. Philip's invitation to Nathaniel was 
to come and see Jesus. This must be our "gospel 
for an age of doubt." 

Today honest inquiry does not reject Christ; what 
it does reject is misconception and caricature. It 
rejects creed, but Christ's magnificence can be crushed 
into no creed, it matters not how pliant and plastic. 
A man climbing the flanks of Pike's peak cannot form 
a final estimate of the survey; he is getting higher 
every moment; the horizon is retreating, the vision 
widening. There are traditional interpretations of 
the Nazarene's teachings, just as there are traditional 
photographs of His profile; but the world owns no 



EXPERIENCE. 



79 



portraiture of the man, and the distortions of the one 
are sometimes as pronounced as those of the other. 
For as the heaven is high above the earth, so high is 
character above creed and deed above doctrine. Mis- 
sionaries tell us that there are Mohammedans, who 
when they see a man intoxicated, exclaim: "He has 
left Mohammed and gone over to Jesus.' ' Such scan- 
dal have we brought upon the sacred Name! Paul 
says that if the men around the cross had only known 
the true Christ, they would not have crucified the 
Lord of Glory. If a doubting world would but come 
and see the real Saviour as He is, they would no 
longer antagonize and reject Him. 

In the ancient myth, Orion, while sleeping on the 
seashore, had his eyes put out; he recovered sight by 
looking to the rising sun. If the inner eye be dark- 
ened, let us turn our blinded hearts to the Sun of 
Righteousness. Jesus is the true Light which lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world. Thus will 
our spiritual vision be recovered and made clear. For 
no person was ever so open and accessible as Jesus. 

Religion has nothing to fear from criticism. Ours 
is an evangel, let us repeat once more, that thrives 
best where the sunlight is strongest. It is for the 
rostrum and the market-place. It brooks no monop- 
oly. It is the friend of the daylight. It works best 
in the fresh air and on the naked hills. It lives for 
the commonwealth. 

There is a famous passage in the opening bars of 
Mendelssohn's "Elijah," in which the musician tries 
to represent the despair of a nation perishing from 
thirst. There are sullen, restless murmurings; there 
are cries of heart-rending agony. The world has tried 



8o HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



to slake its thirst at the dry wells of agnosticism, and 
positivism, and a Christless Christianity; but to-day 
the wail comes back, "Give us back the Christ we 
have lost. ,, The cry of the world to-day is, "Sirs, 
we would see Jesus"; not through a glass darkly, 
not distorted by human prejudice or clouded by 
faulty conception, but Jesus as He is, the real Jesus. 

It is not Calvinism the world wants, nor Armenian- 
ism ; not the thirty nine-articles ; nor is it creed and 
confessional. Nothing but the living Christ Himself 
will satisfy. There is a hungering and a yearning at 
the world's heart for the living Bread which came 
down from Heaven. Men have grown tired of a 
lifeless verbiage. A Christianity without Christ is a 
husk. What the world wants, what the world must 
have, is the personal Jesus — Son of Man, Son of Mary, 
Son of God. Personal experience of the Lord Jesus 
Christ is the only harmonizer of the world's noisy 
discordant, doubting voices. 

If a student refuse to believe that a circle is round, 
then it were folly for him to enter on the study of the 
higher geometry. A physician cannot persuade his 
patient that the medicine is not distasteful if he shuts 
his mouth and clenches his teeth. "Come," the 
Scriptures say, and they say it six hundred and 
forty-two times. "Come, come, come!" 

Come and see this meek and lowly Man for thyself. 
Some things are plain till you commence to explain; 
the noon-day star is lost in the brightness. Some 
things are lustrous till you begin to illustrate. The 
good Christian lady said that the commentary on 
"Pilgrim's Progress," which her pastor had sent to 
her, was not as clear as the text. No sermon about 



EXPERIENCE. 



Si 



Jesus was ever so simple and understandable as 
Jesus. He hides Himself to irreverent approach, but 
there is a beautiful simplicity about Him to the 
child-spirit. The way-faring man, though a fool, 
need not go astray. "Oh, taste and see that the 
Lord is good." No doctrine do we propound; simply 
an acquaintance with the real Jesus. Will you not 
give me the honor, dear hearer, to introduce you to 
the King? Come and see for yourself. Be satisfied 
with no creed, no confessional. Let no priest or 
pastor come 'twixt you and your Lord. Christ is 
Christianity; come and see Christ. 

A dreadful battle that was between Caesar and 
Pompey, when 80,000 brave soldiers lost their lives. 
Caesar tells us that he did not want to fight, but 
Pompey pressed him. After the battle he stood upon 
the field and exclaimed : 

" Alas, he would have it so! " 

Dear sinner, if you are lost, it is because you will 
have it so. Jesus invites you. He wants you. He 
pleads with you. He yearns for you. He died for 
you, and rose again. "Come and try me," He says. 
"Give Me a chance. See whether or not I will 
deceive you. If after a fair trial you find Me false, 
you can return to your old companionships. " 

Could any proposition be simpler, fairer ? You will 
lose nothing. You may gain everything. 

There are two lives possible for us. There is the 
life of trust and the life of insurrection. The life of 
trust is the life of surrender, which is the life of obedi- 
ence, which is the life of harmony, which is the life of 
happiness, which is the life of peace. The life of 
insurrection is the life of self-will, which is the life of 



82 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



rebellion, which is the life of estrangement, which is 
the life of discord, which is the life of unrest. 

Dearly beloved, are you in trouble? Won't you 
come and see Jesus? Are you in temptation? Why 
not come to Jesus? Are you in doubt? Are you 
groping for the light? Are you concerned about your 
sins? Are you interested in pardon and peace of 
conscience? Are you honestly anxious to find the 
way? Do you feel the skepticism of the age eating 
into the groundwork of your early faith? Let me 
plead with you to come and make the acquaintance of 
this man Jesus. I believe He will show you the light. 
He will make things plain. He will make the way 
clear. He will remove doubts. He will make your 
confidence steadfast. He will give you assurance. 
He will make you strong, and clean, and happy, and 
brave. If I did not believe that with all my heart and 
soul and strength and mind, I'd never preach again. 

" I heard the voice of Jesus say, 

I am this dark world's light; 
Look unto me, thy morn shall rise, 

And all thy day be bright. 
I looked to Jesus, and I found 

In Him my Star, my Sun; 
And in that light of life I'll walk, 

Till traveling days are done." 



CHAPTER VI. 



HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-LIFE. 
" That in all things He might have the pre-eminence.' 1 Col. 1 :18. 

The heroes of history are in danger of being lost. 
After death a great man is ofttimes idealized. The 
popular fancy plays around him with a glamor. 
Stories pass current that have no factual ground. 
Memory weaves myth. The pathway of the past 
loses its roughness, for " 'tis always twilight in the 
land of Memory. " 

Memory is the mother of mythology. Plato for 
long was thought to have been born of a virgin. 
Alexander was believed to have been the son of a god. 
All the Caesars were deified as soon as they were dead. 
The early Greeks placed the- Golden Age in the begin- 
ning. Then Saturn lived in person on the earth. He 
was the father of gods and men. There was no pain, 
no sorrow, no disease. Sin was as yet unborn. This 
was succeeded by the age of Bronze, when the gods 
left the earth, and life and government declined. 
Then followed the age of Brass, and finally the age of 
Iron. And so the closer we approach the living 
picture of the present, the coarser its coloring. It 
seems a smear, a smudge, a melancholy daub. Verily, 
indeed, a prophet hath no honor in his own country, 
for " distance lends enchantment. " 

Attention has been drawn to our own George 
Washington, who, alas! has been buried in aprocrypha 
and haze. The real Washington has given way to the 

(83) 



84 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



ideal. One genealogist has traced his ancestry back 
to Odin. The Washington that had his weaknesses 
is gone, and we have instead canonized a Washington 
— Washington the saint, Washington the savior. 

What has history done with Jesus? Let us hasten 
to confess the strange anomaly that history has both 
loved and hated Him. Criticism has attempted to 
destroy Him. Scholars have labored to resolve Him 
into Greek myth and Hebrew legend, but unavailingly . 
At one time His humanity, at another His divinity has 
been obscured. Socinus gave way to Strauss ; Strauss 
to Renan. Stesichorus says that Helena, the heroine 
of Grecian story, was never carried to Troy at all, and 
that the Greeks and Trojans fought for a figure of the 
far-famed beauty; so, it is claimed, did the evangelist 
historians. "They wove the wondrous texture from 
the tangled threads of fond remembrance ; the Sun of 
Righteousness is a torch of human kindling." But 
the final verdict, and calm, is that He is historical. 
His story is not a cunningly concocted tale. He is not 
fabric, but fact. His personality remains imperish- 
able. He is substantial and abiding. Men could not 
have created Him if they would. That were unthink- 
able. The creator is more than the creature. Did 
Matthew create Jesus ? Then, truly has it been noted, 
Matthew is greater than Jesus, and Matthew was a 
tax-collector and a Jew. You cannot evolve a 
Christ from a Matthew. " It takes a Newton to forge 
a Newton," said Theodore Parker. A real historical 
Christ appeared. No other alternative fulfills the 
facts. This is what Vandyke calls the "Gospel "of a 
Person. " 

Of late years there has been a searching study of 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



85 



the real Christ. The Christ of the gospels is better 
known. The literature of His age has been examined 
with such method and minuteness that we have a 
truer setting. Heretofore we have known the Christ 
of theological systems, the Christ of Chalcedon and 
Constance and Trent and Westminster. To-day we 
are studying as never before the Christ of Nazareth 
and Jerusalem. And what is the reuslt? By consent 
unanimous the world thrones Him to-day supreme in 
the realm of Mentality, Morality, Ministry. 

JESUS CHRIST AN INTELLECTUAL FORCE. 

i. — Mentality. Jesus Christ is to-day an intellec- 
tual force in the world. There is no school or court or 
forum where His influence is not felt. There is no 
speech or language where His voice is not heard. His 
sound has gone out through all the earth, and His 
words to the end of the world; they are ever ger- 
minating, ever fruiting. 

The test of greatness is its creativeness, and the 
forces it sets astir. The Jews were an inartistic race 
fenced around by the artist nations of earth — Assyria, 
Babylonia, Egypt and Greece. The apostles, who 
never referred to the subject at all, have yet been 
made the subject of more painting and statuary and 
architectural memorial than the pagan gods of 
Greece and Rome. St. Paul, who stood on Mar's 
Hill seemingly oblivious to the friezes of Phidias, has 
yet figured in the great cartoons of Raphael and the 
oratorios of the masters. This is the commanding 
and perpetual surprise of history, how twelve illiterate 
fishermen have become the centre of all culture. 
Jesus said: "I am the light of the world-," and cer- 



86 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



tainly'He has " focused on Himself the light of the 
world's learning." Haydn and Handel in music; 
Raphael and Reynolds in painting; Angelo and 
Canova in sculpture ; Grotius and Gladstone in states- 
manship ; Blackstone and Burke in law. His teaching 
has lent melody to Mozart's music, grace to Dona- 
tello's marble, loveliness to Fiessole's faces. How 
much does each Rembrandt owe to Jesus! It was the 
Madonna that made Murillo. 

No one can see the whole Christ at once, just as no 
one can see the whole mountain at once. He is the 
gigantic figure of history. To take in His full propor- 
tions, one must fall back. Some things are best seen a 
little way off, as stars become visible when you look a 
$ little away from them. Clamber up the flanks of 
Mount Blanc and you are disappointed; but come 
down into the vale of Chamounix and see the mighty 
monarch tower! 

His speech is not big in bulk. St. Augustine asks 
for thirty volumes to systematize his theology; John 
Calvin is even more ambitious, calling for forty folios. 
But Jesus Christ can be read in half an hour. He 
never tried to preserve it Himself, and He never asked 
another to preserve it. But there is no speech like it. 
It is so simple in phrase that a child need stumble not ; 
it stands alone. Goldsmith says of Dr. Johnson, 
"You make your little fishes talk like whales." 
There is a foolish fondness in many literatteurs for 
swollen language ; yet He spoke of heavenly things in 
homely garb and humble fashion. Nothing could be 
simpler or freer from sign of effort than the mountain- 
talk. Without firstlies, secondlies, or thirdlies, it is so 
informal as to baffle analysis. It does not suggest 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



87 



Aristotle's Organons or Calvin's dialectics. "It is the 
art that conceals art." It is not a mosaic; it is a 
living unit. There are few quotations from learned 
names. There is no long list of citations from any 
Hillel or Shammai. He is not an expositor; He is a 
revealer. His teaching is not commentary; it is text. 
It is not apologetic; it is dogmatic. It does not have 
to be changed to suit each changing age. It fits every 
century — the nineteenth as well as the first, the first 
as well as the nineteenth. It carries the same attrac- 
tion to the west as to the east, to the east as to the 
west. Gibbon sneered at the idea of our Lord's 
sayings being original. He said he had read some of 
them in a work written four hundred years before the 
Nazarene ever saw the light of Palestine. But what 
of that? The rising orb of day mocks not the paling 
Venus. By its own superior glory it throws it into 
shade, even as the glow worm keeps its enemies at 
bay by the blinding brightness of its own flash. 
Venus only caught her brilliant disk by reflection, 
just as the mountain peaks are all ablaze long ere 
sunrise, and flash to the valleys long after setting, the 
glories that bathe their commanding crests. Music, so 
the poet tells us, does not exist until you come to 
man. Nature is a jangle of sounds — the roll of the 
river, the plaint of the pine, the scream of the storm, 
the liberty of the lark. Music means emotion. There 
are a number of beautiful sounds echoing adown the 
corridors of time, but only when Jesus came was 
sound turned into music. 

The intellect of Jesus was a puzzle to the scholars of 
His day. It had a depth and a catholicity they could 
not explain; it had a passion and a poise they could 



88 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



not account for; it had a positiveness and a con- 
structiveness they could not interpret. This note of 
authority was the more strange as He had not been in 
their schools. He dwelt in realm apart. He came 
not asking questions, but answering. Therefore, in 
bewilderment, they said: "Whence hath this man 
these things?" Emerging from the narrowest of 
nations, provincial in thought and texture, He 
stepped out on the arena of life to preach the widest 
of faiths. Nine and forty times in the evangelists do 
we read: " But I say unto you. " " Here we have the 
amazing picture of a simple Hebrew peasant placing 
Himself, in words presumptuous, above His own 
traditions, and asserting authority over human con- 
duct. " He was a Jew at a time when Judaism was 
clannishest. Judea was then the margin of the 
civilized world. 

Surely neither time nor place account for Him ; nor 
does family. He came not of royal blood nor priestly 
line. " Is not this the carpenter, the son of Joseph? " 
Hannibal is the incarnation of the wild Punic spirit. 
The glory of a nation in the science of war calls forth a 
Caesar or a Charlemagne. The poetry and polity and 
philosophy of Athens explain a Plato. The culture of 
the Renaissance accounts for Shakspere and Bacon. 
The decadence of the church for Luther and Wesley. 
But no law of heredity or environment embraces 
Christ. " There are no antecedents large enough for 
His coming, no parentage lofty enough for such a 
Son. " He stands in solitude. 

Christianity has an ethical side, and much has 
been made of it; but it has also an intellectual side, 
and not sufficiently has it been stressed. It has a 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



89 



message for the realm of truth as well as for the 
realm of intellect. Christ is made unto- us wisdom. 
Among His disciples have been strong, heroic, ven- 
turesome, clean-cut thinkers. Jesus places in the 
fore of His teaching His comprehensive command: 
4 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
mind. ,, Our faith thrives not in the atmosphere of 
fear, but of a sound mind. It does not serve roots 
and dry, prickly shrubs to our mind-hunger. The 
Christian who starves his mind starves it not for 
scarcity of strong meat. "Christ reigns today as no 
god in Rome, as no deity in Greece, as no divinity in 
Egypt ever reigned — over civilized, free, progressive 
men." He is so built into our being that no history 
can be written without Him. His voice is on the rolling 
wind. The light of His presence is flashed across the 
mighty deep. The thoughts of His intellect are 
woven into the web of the world's wisdom. Knowl- 
edge of Him has created the richest culture, and 
faith in Him has wielded the mightiest power. 

THE REALM OF MORALS. 

2. Morality. Jesus is supreme, secondly, in the 
realm of morals. 

In describing any great man, some one or two 
terms are used. He is wise, or benevolent, or brave. 
But otherwise is it with Jesus. Jn terming Him 
intellectual, we do not mean that He is more intel- 
lectual than moral or spiritual. His nature is cubic. 
" The length and the breadth and the height of it are 
equal." No one trait describes Him, because all 
others are equally bold. His is not a mountainous 
nature whose every peak has its corresponding valley, 



go 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Switzerland-like. He is all mountain, and hence all 
plain. His perfection shuts Him off from definition, 
as a sphere cannot be grasped for roundness. Many 
years before Plato had expressed the hope that the 
moral law might become incarnate. Law alone was 
cold and colorless. Fulfilling this heart-hunger, 
"the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." 

Now, some of our brainiest thinkers have been 
sadly defective in character and conduct. You are 
to see the glowing genius, the daring achievement, 
the immortal lyric, the literary charm. Byron and 
Paul Verlaine soar with eye sunward and heart on 
carrion; so, many of our sons of genius have had 
depraved appetites and affections. Burns could sing 
like the lark, and fly where foulness lay, like the 
condor. How brilliant Aaron Burr the lawyer, how 
like a beast the man! Oft in our biographical rev- 
ellings the eye greets Bacchus dancing to the strains 
of some Mozart or Mendelssohn. The abattoir is 
hidden in honeysuckle. Looseness and license are 
gilded with lustre, as a mud puddle might be fringed 
with golden border. 

Not thus Jesus. His character supports His intel- 
lect even as the column supports the capital. In the 
Houses of Parliament at London there is a standard 
linear measurement built into the walls; it is avail- 
able to all, and infallible. Jesus Christ is the infallible 
standard of perfect manhood, built into the temple 
of our humanity. In vain we search for lapse or 
flaw. The strongest glass does not expose a blemish. 
Enemies have searched His career with lamp and 
candle, but no profane tongue has ever whispered a 
suggestion against His blameless name. His char- 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



9.1 



acter is blotless; His life spotless. His was piety 
without penitence. His perfection has no parallel, 
no approach. 

Proof needed? Witness Channing, the Unitarian: 
" His character is wholly removed from human com- 
prehension." Witness Theodore Parker: "His is 
the mightiest heart that ever beat in human breast." 
Witness Jean Paul, the freethinker: "Jesus is the 
purest among the mighty, the mightiest among the 
pure." Witness Strauss, the skeptic: "He is the 
highest model of religion within the reach of human 
thought." Witness Renan: "Whatever the sur- 
prises of history, Jesus will never be surpassed." 
We will add no more. He needs no certificate of 
recommendation signed by any of earth's Rousseaus 
or Voltaires. It helps not, nor does it hinder, what 
John Stuart Mill thought of Jesus. Full oft we grieve 
Him with patronage, but the verdict is interesting. 

Now, character has this remarkable distinction: 
you can place it. Given a certain character, and 
you can tell when it lived and where. If a man is an 
expert archaeologist and you give him a mummy, he 
can tell exactly where the body was embalmed and 
when. Denuding the dead of its wrappings, and 
studying swathe and texture, he can fix precisely 
place and period — anywhere between 3,800 b. c. and 
700 a. d., the two extremes between which the art 
was practiced. So with a code of laws. The political 
economist can trace it to its indigenous clime and soil 
and habitat. 

But Christ cannot be localized. He belongs to the 
nineteenth century as much as to the first, nay more, 
for just as Handel must needs wait for our age with 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



its improved instrumentation and superior skill to 
have a worthier rendering and a fitter embodiment 
for his oratorios, even so the nineteenth century is 
nearer Christ than the second, the second is at a 
greater remove from Him than the nineteenth. 
Verily He is the "man without a country," because 
the man of every country. All national lines are lost 
in Him. He belongs to all territory, all time. He 
belongs to no class; He is beyond class. 

Does the age explain Him? Great men some- 
times are the incarnation of the spirit of the age. It 
is not strange that Socrates should preach sobriety, 
as when he philosophized the Spartans were a sober 
people. Think, then, of the times in which Jesus 
lived. Virgil and Horace had just died; Livy was 
yet living, and at the apex of his fame. What say 
they? The jury is unanimous; it was the corruptest 
age that the world had ever seen. On Mount Olym- 
pus were gods and goddesses representing every 
human passion. Mars was the god of war, Mercury 
of theft, Bacchus of drink. You could not offer a 
greater insult to a Roman gentleman than to tell him 
he was like his god. When Herod the Great gave 
the order from his death-bed that his own child 
should be strangled, he did nothing shocking to the 
sentiment of his time. Froude tells us that few 
statesmen died a natural death. Plato grouped 
slaves and wives together in his " Ideal Republic." 
Juvenal says: * 4 Many are divorced ere their nuptial 
flowers are faded." Seneca tells us that "many 
women counted their years by the number of their 
husbands." What saith Tacitus? That the Roman 
Empire was so corrupt that he preferred not to detail. 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



93 



" We can," he says, "but stand at the cavern's mouth 
and glance into its dark depths; were we to enter, 
our lamp would be quenched by the foul air.'' And 
what saith our Matthew Arnold? If he has any 
prejudices, they certainly lean not our way. 

" On that hard pagan world, disgust 
And sated loathing fell; 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 

Surely no honest man will claim that the age ex- 
plains Jesus. " He was a root out of a dry ground." 
Heaven's brightest glory and earth's blackest guilt 
seem here to meet. In the mire a lily blooms. 

Material bodies throw off emanations. The violets 
breathe their aroma modestly. The mignonette 
throws itself out farther and fills a wider circle. The 
orange grove flings its fragrance far afield, flavoring 
whole leagues with its welcome. So likewise men; 
some have good atmosphere, some a bad. Some 
seem born in the spring, some in the autumn. Some 
breathe balm, some brimstone. Margaret informs 
Faust that the very sight of Mephistopheles made 
her blood curdle. She knew him not. He might 
have been a holy hermit for aught she could tell. 
His mouth was bubbling o'er with pious platitude. 
Yet, in some way mysterious, she felt his approach 
freezing to lofty impulse. She could not pray when 
he was near. 

How differently Jesus! In His presence faith 
revived and blushed into bloom and color. Hypoc- 
risy was quieted, and prayer found vent and voice, 
There was a certain atmosphere around Him that 
made it easier for His followers to believe in goodness. 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



Men were at their best in His company. They were 
conscious of an uplift. 

Not many Gladstones, a certain historian notes, 
but there are a few that share with him the wreaths 
of the rostrum. Not many Napoleons, but there are 
some who dispute his empire in the art of war. Not 
many Schuberts; some, however. Poets are plen- 
tiful as stars in the evening, and perhaps Shakspere 
approaches loneliness the nearest; but the gap be- 
tween Shakspere and Milton is finite, while 'twixt 
Jesus and His nearest rival the sweep is infinite. Of 
Jesus alone can it be said that He had absolutely no 
competitor. He is the peerless Christ. This is the 
unique glory of the Virgin's Son — His aloneness. 
There have been other sacred singers — Seneca, Con- 
fucius, Zoroaster; but they are twittering sparrows to 
the lark. Here is Socrates and Buddha and Marcus 
Aurelius, but how they dwindle in the measurement! 
"What prepossession," said Rousseau, "to compare 
the son of Sophroniscus with the Son of Mary! What 
an infinite disproportion!" Scripture has a gallery 
of worthies — Enoch, Abraham, David, Paul — what 
a roll call of immortals ! Yet one thing is common to 
them all. They are all concluded under sin, and all 
are penitent for sin. Jesus alone is sinless. In Him 
all graces meet, as all colors melt into the white solar 
ray. We do not see the several colors because they 
are so blended. His is the full action of a perfect 
nature. 

THE MINISTERING CHRIST. 

3. Ministry. Whether we measure Christ by the 
shadow He has cast upon each century or by the light 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



95 



He has thrown across it, He is equally great. He 
called Himself the light of the world. It takes light 
to create shadow, and the greatest shadow is the 
shadow of Himself — the Cross. 

Certainly more hearts have been touched by the 
shadow than the brightness. The death of Jesus is 
the divine center of Christianity, the culmination of 
His ministry, and the controlling chapter of the 
Gospel story. Of Tissot's 365 paintings, 310 are on 
the ministry and passion. "I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto Me." "His suffer- 
ings," says Renan, ''will melt the noblest hearts until 
the end of time." A theory is only powerful when a 
heart stands behind it and fills it with its life, as the 
reservoir lives behind the faucet, as the Rocky Moun- 
tains live behind the Mississippi. 

If He was the model preacher, He was also the 
model pastor. Da Vinci paints Him a man burdened 
with sorrow, but when the true artist arises he will 
figure a ministering Christ. "He came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister." It is claimed 
that Tintoret approaches nearest to that ideal. Im- 
possible to discover a single selfish action in His whole 
unparalleled career; so self- forgetful was He. His 
love was mingled with pity. When He saw the mul- 
titude He was moved with passion and compassion. 
He went about doing good. He was brother to the 
beggar. He never gave a thought to His own phys- 
ical ease. He never performed a miracle for His own 
comfort. He could have turned stones into bread, 
and yet He hungered. His ministry was so manifold 
that there was no phase of life it did not reach. He 
went to the homes of the poor and the haunts of the 



o6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



outcast, helping and healing. He never cloistered 
Himself. He lived in the open. He ministered to 
human tear by human touch.- Truly man never 
spake like this man, nor did Man ever live like Him. 
His parables He first spoke, then acted. "He came 
to seek and to save the lost." 

The greatest are those who serve. Ever since, this 
has become the foundation of all true chivalry. Here 
is Antigone dying rather than desert the body of her 
dead brother. Here is George Atley, a young 
Englishman in the Central African Mission, with the 
instincts and heart of a hero. The story came to us 
last year of his being attacked by a party of natives. 
He had with him a Winchester repeating rifle with 
ten chambers loaded ; he had the party completely at 
his mercy. Calmly and coolly he summed up the 
situation, and finally concluded that if he killed them 
he would do more harm to the mission than were he to 
let them take his own life. So as a lamb to the 
slaughter he was led, and when his dead body was 
found in the stream, his rifle was also found, its ten 
chambers untouched. 

Here is a young doctor dying recently in one of our 
hospitals. In a case of malignant diphtheria it 
became necessary to clear the throat of the sufferer 
by suction. He knew the outcome of the experiment; 
yet in the interest of science and suffering he volun- 
teered, and saved a life by the sacrifice of his own. 

And what shall we more say? Time would fail us 
to tell of the Patons and Pattesons, the Allan Gard- 
ners and Wilberforces, the Goughs and Willards. 
Long the scroll of the self-sacrificing engineers and 
captains and heroes unlettered, who did their duty in 



CHRIST-LIFE. 



97 



the "scorn of consequences." Who are the true 
Garibaldis and Garrisons and Grace Darlings of earth ? 
Sons and daughters of ministry are they all. Rubens 
never painted a picture like the career of Florence 
Nightingale. No Handel ever composed an oratorio 
like the career of John Howard. The Napoleons and 
Caesars of earth have been murderers, not ministers. 
They soaked the soil with the blood of their brothers, 
but they never shed their own blood. Joseph Mazzini 
was a true hero. He shed his own blood. Father 
Damien was a true hero. He shed his own blood. 
Abraham Lincoln was a true hero. He shed his own 
blood. But if the greatness of these worthies is only 
reflected greatness, their love is only reflected love. 

Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole 
matter. Criticism and culture throne the Christ pre- 
eminent. Now abide His mind, His morals and His 
ministry — these three. He is supreme in all, but the 
greatest of these is His ministry. He is the great 
theme of the pulpit. He remains the " chief est among 
ten thousand and the altogether lovely." "If 
Shakspere were to enter this room," said Charles 
Lamb, "I would rise up to do him honor; but if 
Jesus Christ were to enter, I would fall down in wor- 
ship and adore. " The old legend tells of the god 
imprisoned in the tree. Whoever cut the tree 
wounded the god. Ofttimes in our preaching we 
feel we have been mutilating His glory. But take no 
thought. That were impossible. The subject is too 
lovely to be marred, too rich to be impoverished. No 
man can rob the Matterhorn of its majesty. Eighteen 
hundred years of infidel distortion have not served to 
fade the immortal features. They are lovelier than 



9 8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



ever. Voltaire said that he would pass through the 
forest of Scripture and girdle all the trees, so that in 
one hundred years not a limb would be left to fence 
the sacred enclosure from profanity. But the one 
hundred years are gone, and not a leaf hath withered, 
and still the trunks are full of sap. We know Him no 
more after the flesh, and yet His glory lingers on the 
mountain tops and loathes to leave. 

But there are some in whose eyes He hath no 
beauty. He is despised and rejected of men. Think 
it not strange. There are some in whose eyes the 
sunset hath no beauty. But He shall see of the 
travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. Not in 
vain was He wounded for our transgressions, and 
bruised for our iniquities. With His stripes we have 
been healed and reconciled to God. "For He is the 
head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, 
the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He 
might have the pre-eminence. " 



CHAPTER VII: 



HARMONY WITH THE CHRIST-PITY. 

" When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity." Matt. 
9:36. 

"Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, a 
heart full of pity." Col. 3 :12. 

"Like as a father pitieth his children. Psalm 103:13. 

Turning over the pages of the Christ-teaching, how 
wonderful, how summery, is the picture of God! He 
is our Father, waiting on bird and beast; caring for 
lily and sparrow; with tears for the under-man; not 
breaking the bruised reed ; not quenching the smoking 
flax; covering us with His feathers; with a great, big, 
bursting human heart of pity for life's unfortunate 
children. 

How partial any paraphrase of ours must be of the 
great world-Shepherd! Photographers tell us that 
these mountains round about are too large for their 
camera-plates. Compelled are they to take Baldy and 
Greyback and San-Jacinto in sections. Thus, God is 
too big for definition, too far away for perfect imprint. 

So we turn to something tender; turn our kodak on 
the foot hills, as it were, with their warmth and 
greenery. 

"When He saw the multitude He was moved with pity." 
"Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, 
a heart full of pity." 

"Like as a father pitieth his children." 

" Pity, " says J. F. Clarke, " lies at the core of all the 
great religions." The chapters of the Koran, all of 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



them, begin with these words: "In the name of God, 
the compassionate, the merciful. " The vast religion 
of Buddha numbers five hundred million votaries, and 
pity is the key-note to it all. 

KINDNESS TO ANIMALS. 

Let us first speak a word on behalf of the brute 
world. 

That was rather a startling charge brought against 
us Christians at the Parliament of Religions, some 
years ago, by the Brahmins and Buddhists present, 
when they said : 

" You Christians are cruel to animals. " 

Such sport as we witnessed once in a little Western 
village cannot soon be lost to memory, when twelve 
poor, helpless rabbits were let loose and hounded — 
their limbs dismembered and torn apart, their flesh 
hacked into pieces and tossed hither and thither by 
the dogs, while cowardly oaths and cheers filled the 
air with blasphemy. 

Some one says there were no wild beasts until there 
were wild men. Fallen man becomes a savage, and 
asks for a gun. He would civilize with shot and 
powder. He would be cruel to his own horse; his 
own dog he would starve. Even the little feathered 
songsters of the forest flee with trembling when man 
comes near. The poet sings of man's inhumanity to 
man. Alas, too, for man's inhumanity to brutes 
and birds ! 

There is a bird called the white heron, that has its 
habitat along the coast of Florida. There birds have 
beautiful white feathers, known in milliners' shops as 
aigrette plumes. Artistic and admirable are they, 



CHRIST-PITY. 



IOI 



did we not know how they are obtained ; for at breed- 
ing time the parent-birds are shot down in their nests, 
and while the body of the mother is left to rot in the 
sun, the little brood of young herons is left to starve in 
the nest. It is not many months ago that we read of a 
New York merchant boasting that in one season his 
men had killed 150,000 birds for millinery purposes 
along the coast of Florida, the result being that the 
white heron is now almost exterminated. 

Passing strange and wonderful, how the hand and 
heart of man seem to delight in the inflicting of pain ! 
Our wonder grows apace when we remember that 
man likes to tease and torture himself so little. Boys 
pin insects to the floor, pull wings from flies, and 
mutilate fowls and fishes. Not a sparrow falls to the 
ground without our Father's notice, but for sport 
older boys — grey-headed ones — will wound and lacer- 
ate these innocent little chirpers. For the sake of 
science, thousands of animals are yearly taken into 
each laboratory, laid on a table of torment, and 
slowly poisoned by some inoculating virus. For the 
lust of land, nations will revel in the sickening cruelties 
of war, and look with complacency on their brother 
man in pain. Yet all the while the voice divine keeps 
whispering to each ruthless persecutor, ''Be ye kind 
one to another, tender hearted, " pointing anon to that 
glad time when the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, 
the leopard with the kid; when the calf and fatling 
and young lion shall walk together, and a little child 
shall lead them; there being nothing to hurt or 
destroy in all God's holy mountain. 

" If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, 
how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" It 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



does not stir our wonder over-much that those who 
are pitiless and without feeling toward God's innocent 
creatures of the field and forest, should be hard and 
unrelenting likewise toward their fellow-toilers on the 
street and in the home. 

When a statesman was once asked how the poor 
people were to live through a famine, he replied : 

1 ' To with the people ; let them eat grass. " 

When Marie Antoinette was riding "to her betrothal 
in Notre Dame, she ordered all beggars, cripples, and 
paupers from the line of march. She would not have 
even a glimpse of misery's children. Even a man as 
great as Edmund Burke, referring to the manner in 
which this selfish woman was afterwards treated, 
speaks of the 4 'swinish multitude." When Prince 
Metternich, the Austrian diplomat, once told Napo- 
leon that his scheme would cost the lives of 100,000 
men, Napoleon laughed: 

" 100,000 men! what are 100,000 men to me? " 

Robert Louis Stevenson once crossed the Atlantic 
in the steerage of an ocean liner. Although the most 
considerable passenger aboard, he went in the steerage 
from choice, not necessity. In his story, "The 
Amateur Emigrant, " he describes for us what he saw. 
He saw a supercilious parade of wealth that grieved 
him, an insolence that enraged him. 

Recently it was my privilege to converse with a 
manufacturer of note. Standing at the window of his 
office, he watched his workingmen coming out of the 
mill and hastening to their noon-day meal. 

"A lot of animals, " he gruffly remarked; " only by 
holding the whip over them can I get anything out of 
them. I treat them like animals. " 



CHRIST-PITY; 



103 



Contrariwise, here is John Brown, his body pierced 
with bullets, stooping to kiss the little colored lad on 
his way to the gallows. 

Here is Livingstone found dead on his knees in 
prayer in the heart of Africa, with that great craggy 
head tipped over resting on his open Bible, and his 
finger pointing to the last words he ever penned in his 
diary: 

"Oh, God, when will the open sore of the world 
be healed? " 

Here is Mrs. Booth. When first she went to Shef- 
field, it seemed as though the angry mob hurled every 
foul epithet at her. They cursed her, egged her, 
howled at her like drunken demons, silenced her in the 
middle of her story. She stood before them on the 
platform and burst into tears, and just said: 

" My dear friends, I love you. " 

Here is Lord Shaftesbury. A little before his 
death, Miss Cobb wrote him a letter, asking what it 
could have been that ever tempted him from the 
society of royalty f o be the knight-errant of the poor. 
The answer he gave was never published till after his 
death. He said that when a lad of ten or twelve, he 
was sored to see that nearly all the aristocratic boys 
with whom he played looked down on the poorer 
children and taunted them. 

Here is John Ruskin, heir to a million dollars and 
with his pen earning a million more — the first prose 
writer of the century, world-famous as an author at 
twenty-one. Court and college strove to banquet 
and do him reverence. No door of privilege but 
swung wide open to his gentlest knock. Walking 
through Whitechapel one day; he saw sights that 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



made his heart sick. He saw every brick discharging 
matter. He saw anarchy rampant, and hell let loose. 
No blade of grass, no park, no herb, no shrub, no 
flower, no marble, no book, no picture. When he 
saw the degradation he was moved. 

In that hour East London seemed to him like some 
earthly inferno whose smothered Macedonian sob was 
crying out: " Won't you come and help us?" To 
this place John Ruskin felt he must go. He founded 
museums, clubs, schools, charities. He gave them 
his paintings, curios, books, art-treasures. Weekly 
he went thither to give them himself. 

One day on his weekly visits there was a beggar on 
the corner who asked of him daily an alms, and who 
never had been refused. This day the grateful beg- 
gar suddenly caught the outstretched hand and 
kissed it. Mr. Ruskin, with a sudden impulse, bent 
forward and kissed the beggar's cheek. Next morn- 
ing the poor fellow came to his lodgings with tears in 
his eyes, bringing a gift. 

"Just a piece of brown cloth," said the beggar, 
"from the robe of St. Francis." 

This relic Ruskin cherished through life, thinking 
it more beautiful than anything Turner ever drew. 

A story of Henry Ward Beecher at his last service 
in Plymouth Church is vouched for by the choir. It 
was the last sermon he ever preached. Coming down 
from his pulpit after the great congregation had 
scattered, he felt tired and weary. He saw two little 
ragged street waifs far back in the rear. Passing the 
door, they had heard the choir rehearsing, and tim- 
orously wandered in. The piece they were singing 
was: "I heard the voice of Jesus say." The great 



CHRIST-PITY. 



man walked down the aisle, put his arm round each 
little waif, stooped down and kissed them tenderly, 
then walked out into the street, leaving that great 
arena of his triumphs forever. How beautiful! The 
great, big-hearted genius loving the little beggars. 

And what shall we say more? Here lastly is Jesus. 
When He saw the multitude He was moved. He 
chose for His earthly home the place where were the 
multitudes. Wherever He went He saw that sea of 
swelling, surging life, that ceaseless pour, that noisy, 
restless flow of faces. It appealed to Him. He saw 
the crowd, and the depth of His being was stirred. 
Dr. Morton, a Boston dentist, discovered anaesthesia 
in 1846. The other day, in London, the jubilee of 
this blessed boon to mankind was signalized. It 
seemed to be the conviction of the great company of 
medical experts present that the human body is 
becoming increasingly sensitive to pain. How ex- 
quisitively sensitive our Master was! How keenly 
He could feel! How easily shrink! How alive in 
every nerve of His nature! His surely was the most 
impressive spirit that ever felt life's pathos. 

Strauss was so touched by our Lord's tenderness 
that George Elliot said she could not do justice to 
translating the pages of the great German critic 
without having the crucifix before her. 

Ah, beloved, we may call ourselves disciples of the 
Master; but if we are insolent toward the lowly, 
high-minded toward the humble ones, we are not 
His disciples. He will not, cannot own us. 

Ours is an age that worships intellect. Many of 
you have seen Delaroche's immortal oil painting in 
the French Academy. He grouped around a marble 



io6 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



chair of state the master minds of all ages — artists, 
architects, sculptors, thinkers, inventors, statesmen, 
scientists. He puts intellect on the throne. The 
great hearts of the world are crowded out. Shaks- 
pere is there, Homer is there, Newton is there, 
La Place is there; but the John Howards and David 
# Livingstones and Florence Nightingales of earth are 
not there. For in Delaroche's estimate heart had 
no right to a niche in the Temple of Fame. 

How different that scene in the Gospel gallery, 
where the Lord of glory is seen washing the disciples' 
feet, and teaching that the greatest are they who 
serve. 

Not that our faith belittles brain. It refuses to 
assign to it the first place; that is all. It champions 
a truthful perspective. Its assault is on the heart. 
Salvation means salvation of the heart; any other 
kind of salvation were mythological. Let the head 
rule the heart, and you have the Spanish inquisition. 
Let the heart rule the head, and you have the Refor- 
mation. Head without heart is cold, conventional 
— a picture without color. No man will die for a 
truth till that truth twines itself arounS the tendril 
of his heart. Erasmus was keener-witted than 
Luther, but Luther was bigger-hearted, and Luther, 
not Erasmus, did the work. Daniel Webster had a 
mightier brain than Harriet Beecher Stowe, but 
Daniel Webster stood for slavery. It has been said 
that " Uncle Tom's Cabin" did more to sweep the 
slave curse from our beloved land than all the intel- 
lects in Congress. The seal of Whitfield had for its 
device a winged heart soaring above the stars. Jenny 
Lind captivated the multitudes because her Heart 



CHRIST-PITY. 



107 



was sweeter than her voice. Once Ruskin and 
Carlyle were discussing the literature of their day. 

"Why is it," said Carlyle, "that Emerson and 
yourself scarcely pay for the cost of publishing, 
while trashy novels run up into the hundred thou- 
sands? " 

Ruskin thought for a little, then answered: 

"Because the novel has love in it." 

Surely it is so. Man is not complete until some 
great love possesses him. Love lifts the tired feet 
forward and lends wings. Love levels the hills, 
tunnels the mountains, shortens the journey along 
which duty calls, cuts a foot-path through the forest. 
No man can be great who is not tender-hearted. He 
may be a great fighter like Alexander, or a great bear 
like Carlyle, but not a great man. A great man is a 
man easily touched. He. is not the best general who 
has a thirst for blood. He is the best general who 
is the most humane. 

Many there are to-day who steel themselves against 
the tender in religion. They love to hear an intel- 
lectual discourse, they tell us. But the appeal that 
moves and melts they stifle and suppress. They 
regard it as a synonym for weakness. If men feel 
thus, not so God. His message is nothing if not 
tender; the old, old story of the Gospel is full of tears. 
Woe to the man who never weeps! Unworthy the 
man who glories in it. Heroes have always wept, 
from the giants that stride through Homer's lines 
down to Grant and Farragut and Abraham Lincoln. 
The man who thinks it weak to sob in the presence of 
sorrow is not the child of strength or greatness. We 
pity people born deformed in body, the man with a 



io8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



club foot, him of the withered arm. Shall we have no 
sympathy for the man with withered morals, for the 
pathos of life, its sadness, its anguish, its sins? 

Sin it was that necessitated Calvary. In Geth- 
semane I see my Saviour sweating blood-drops for the 
sin of the world. On Calvary I see Him wrestling 
with the enemy, and pouring out His life. Has that 
no appeal for my heart? When He looked down upon 
the multitude, He wept. He saw them as sheep 
not having a shepherd. He wept over their hardness, 
their unbelief, their turning a deaf ear to their own 
eternal welfare. He wept when He thought of what 
they were missing. Never did He weep for Himself. 
No nails driven in His hands or feet ever started a sigh. 
When man denied Him, betrayed Him, mocked Him, 
spat upon Him, crucified Him, He did not weep ; but 
when He came nigh unto Jerusalem, that wicked city, 
He burst out into tears : 

"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the 
prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, 
how often would I have gathered thy children 
together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her 
wings, but ye would not ! " 

He weeps over you, this morning, sinner. He weeps 
over your hard, cold indifference. He weeps because 
you reject His overtures of love. " You will not come 
unto Me, that you might have life! " 

Let us note, lastly, that love is never at its highest 
till it is mingled with pity. 

Balzac has driven home this truth with a story. 
He brings us back to an old Flemish mansion in the 
year 1812, where a woman, Josephine by name, was 
sitting in a deep arm chair one evening, looking out 



CHRIST-PITY. 



109 



upon the garden. She was hard-featured; she was 
plain. Her thick, black hair fell in heavy curls upon 
her shoulders. Her forehead, very prominent and 
narrow at the temples, was yellow in tint. Her face, 
Spanish in type, was dark-skinned, and pitted with 
the small-pox. Hot tears were rolling from her eyes. 
The nose, aquiline as the beak of an eagle, gave the 
impression of some interior malformation. The lip 
was large and curved, yet betraying the pride of noble 
birth. Yes, she was ordinary, that was clear; and 
still the worst is not told, for she was both lame and 
deformed. She belonged to one of the illustrious fam- 
ilies of Belgium, but she had renounced her share of 
her father's property to enable her brother to make a 
marriage worthy of the name, for she never expected 
to marry herself, being weighted down by a sense of 
physical disfigurement. 

And now the rich nobleman, Balthazar, appears 
and wishes to wed her; but her poverty and his 
wealth, her deformity and his handsome physique, 
make her distrustful. The sense of her admitted 
imperfections made her difficult to win as the most 
beautiful of women. The fear of some day displeasing 
the eye of her lover roused her pride. She asked 
herself if Balthazar were not playing with her; were 
not seeking a domestic slave ; whether he had himself 
no secret defect to be satisfied with a poor, ill-favored 
girl who had nothing to offer him. It would need a 
volume, the novelist goes on to say, to paint the love 
of a young girl humbly submissive to the verdict of a 
world that calls her plain. It involves fierce jealousy 
of happiness, freaks of cruel vengeance against some 
fancied rival, that exaltation of heart which the face 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



must not betray, the fear that we may not be under- 
stood, and the boundless joy of being so; for ugliness 
hath no charm. A beautiful woman can be her 
natural self, the world overlooks her little foibles ; but 
a single glance can check the noblest expression on the 
lips of a homely creature, give timidity to the eye and 
awkwardness to her carriage. 

Often, to test his love, she refused to wear the 
draperies that partially concealed her deformities, and 
her Spanish eyes fairly danced when she saw that 
Balthazar thought her beautiful as before. The glory 
of our humanity is to be adored for an imperfection. 
Not to observe a woman's deformity may be human, 
but to love her because she is deformed, that surely is 
divine. What is that beautiful thought of Beaumont 
and Fletcher? " Of all the paths that lead to woman's 
heart, pity is the strongest. " There are those who 
are loved for their beauty, as there are those who are 
married for their money. But love bestowed upon 
life's disinherited children, verily that must be the 
mysterious passion, the perfect flower of heaven. 

And this is the sermon that Balzac's story preaches 
with such splendid effect, that love is only perfect 
when mingled with pity. This is our Heavenly 
Father's love. "He saw us ruined in the fall, yet 
loved us notwithstanding all." "Like as a father 
pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear 
Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth 
that we are dust. " 

Oh, mother, dear, why do you waste such love on 
that poor child? Do you not see that he is a cripple, 
has curvature of the spine, always will be a cripple? 
See the little fellow creeping on his hands and knees! 



CHRIST-PITY. 



in 



The doctor says he can never be strong; always will 
be a source of anxiety to you; most likely never will 
be able to walk. Why worry so over him? What 
good will he ever be ? 

Ah, if you spoke thus, she would give you a look that 
would shrivel you. 

" My silent boy, I hold thee to my breast, 

Just as I did when thou wast newly born; 
It may be sinful, but I love thee best, 

And kiss thy lips the longest night and morn.' 
Oh, thou art dear to me beyond all others, 

And when I breathe my trust and bend my knee 
For blessing on thy sisters and thy brothers, 

God seems the nighest when I pray for thee." 

Such, dear reader, is God's love for us — His poor 
sin-crippled children. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



HARMONY AND COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 

" Why is the house of God forsaken? Neh. 13:11. 
"Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as 
the manner of some is." Heb. 10:25. 

Two voices from long-ago! 

Back, far away in the twilight of History, the 
prophet seeth the forlorn condition of his people now 
returning from exile, and mourneth the fact that the 
temple of worship was being deserted; while many 
centuries later the writer to the Hebrews takes up a 
like lament, warneth his readers against a similar 
neglect, provoking them conjointly to love and good 
works and the duty of public assembling. 

Herein is surely found a danger-lesson for us. For 
it were so patent on the very face as to seem scarcely 
needing of proof, that the sanctuary to-day is being 
abandoned, that church attendance is on the wane, 
that it is no longer " not respectable " to live aloof, but 
rather that some of the most honored, upright and 
reputable of our citizens are stone deaf to the call of 
church chime and steeple, that in our large cities at 
least three-fourths of our voters never darken the 
doorway of any meeting place for prayer or praise, and 
that from one end of our beloved land to the other the 
same cry is heard: "Why is the house of God for- 
saken ? " The church to-day has lost its foregone hold 
upon men. Altogether is that statement beyond a 
doubt. So noticeable is the lapse as scarcely to be 
entitled to serious debate. 



(112) 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 113 



What may some of the reasons be that are forth- 
coming in answer to the question the prophet asks 
with such heaviness of heart ? 

Many there be who find explanation within the 
church itself — charging her, as at present organized, 
with being behind the times, with slavery to tradition, 
with intellectual iron-rule, with having a shivering 
dread of thinking, with emphasizing doctrine to the 
discount of deed, with sermon weakness and over- 
stress of the emotional. 

These are not uneducated men. Ofttimes they are 
educated men, men of sight and insight, and this is the 
result of their honest review. On the other side they 
pass by. In truth, hardly could they do otherwise. 
Carrying out their convictions to the letter, they will 
not ask her ministrations, even in sorrow. Having 
ignored it in life, to be consistent they should ignore it 
also in death; and compared with the man who lives 
indifferently and apart, and yet wishes a Christian 
burial, men of that type the church rather admires. 

A large company there is who have forsaken the 
church because they claim they need the Sabbath for 
rest and outdoor diversion. 

"I labor all the week," the clerk says, "in an 
atmosphere of dust and impurity. I feel the need 
when Sunday comes, for fresher vision, for purer light; 
a breath of the ocean will lift me higher unto things 
unseen. What need for a building made with hands, 
when out yonder is the greater building not made with 
hands? . Can I not find God in the wide temple of 
nature on the mountain top, under the oak tree, by 
the sea shore, where the mighty Maker is the organist, 



ii4 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 

where the heaving billows are the bellows, where the 
sea birds are the choir? " 

And time would fail us to detail the varied lesser 
reasons that have estranged so many from the sanc- 
tuary; that the poor are excluded from its worship; 
that the clergy are the servants of the moneyed class; 
that the pew rental" system grades the people and robs 
the service of its spiritual brotherhood and equality; 
that the pulpit rings not with a genuine note. Many 
and multiform are the reasons given why the temple of 
worship is being forsaken. 

Excuses, alas, not reasons! For it doth seem that 
the real reason is rarely confessed. Ours is an age in 
which, in religious matters, men hasten to shift the 
real issue; and the clear, concurrent testimony of our 
students and seers to-day sweeps all pretence aside, 
leads direct to the inner life, and points to the skepti- 
cism of a materialistic and mammon- worshipping age, 
which has changed the emphasis from Eternity back to 
Time, as the root-cause of all our spiritual unrest. 

It is the purpose, then, of this chapter to introduce 
the Gospel message by hastening to note that for 
which the temple of prayer forever stands — immova- 
ble, impregnable. 

i. — GOD. 

God is the one answer of every human want. No 
age, no nation, no people, but has some time uttered 
the cry: " Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! " 
Tribes there are without written speech, without mar- 
riage, without government-code; but no tribe without 
its deity. Perhaps it is a deity of wood or stone or 
tree or star or reptile; a deity, may-be, of dead 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 115 



ancestors; but some deity. The soul of humanity 
looks Godward as easily, as naturally, as the eagle- 
wing sours cloudward. To say that such a universal 
instinct means nothing were as unreasonable as to say 
that the lifting of the vapor from the river-depths 
means nothing. 

The belief is all the more remarkable when we 
remember that it runs athwart the grain of life's 
natural temper. It lays a tax upon the time, the 
talent, the opportunity, the possession, the outfit. It 
asks for tithes, temples, pagodas, sacrifices, priests, 
idols, graven images, golden calves. It imposes obli- 
gations men do not care to meet. Why does not sober 
reason rise and overturn a faith that is distasteful? 
Because the faith is rooted in human life. To tear it 
out would tear out man's humanity. 

In the early years of the past century there arose in 
France a most remarkable man. Poor was he, 
inordinately ambitious, trained to hardship, clothed 
with exceptional brain-power, and yet withal a man of 
toil, indefatigable, unceasing — Augustus Comte. He 
was an authority on astronomy, political economy, 
mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. He died 
in 1857, and to this day the anniversary of his death is 
celebrated by his French and English followers, by 
such men as John Morley, Frederic Harrison, and, in 
her day, George Elliot. For sheer intellectual grasp 
and vigor, Comte ranks with Leibnitz and Descartes. 
Humboldt was one of his admirers, and John Stuart 
Mill called him the "most wonderful deep sea thinker 
since the age of Aristotle. " His character was stern, 
inflexible, but pure, high-minded, and with an iron 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



devotion to what he considered the service of man- 
kind. 

He was the founder of a system of thought called 
the Positivist School ; that is, nothing is to be accepted 
which cannot be proven by the positive agreement of 
the senses. The truths of religion, like the facts of 
science, were made to rest on certainty. Thus God 
was swept aside. " He led Him to the confines of the 
I universe and bowed Him out." Religion was done 
away with. Bibles were knocked down with ruthless 
and fearful iconoclasm. Hard it is to believe, and yet 
the fact abides, that before Augustus Comte died he 
established a church of his own, with its calendar of 
saints, its sacred days, its catechism, »its Sabbath, its 
Bible, its God. The cathedral mind of his great man 
had bowed the Deity out, but the heart insurrected 
and rebelled. 

Surely it were difficult to conceive a more convinc- 
ing proof that God is grounded in human life. That is 
the witness of every temple. No steeple throughout 
the land but points the heart to the Unseen One 
whose throne is heaven, whose footstool is earth. Day 
unto day the church spire speaks, and night unto 
night it showeth knowledge. With steel point and in 
starry letter it writes its creed across the breast of 
night, " I believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker 
of heaven and earth. " 

II. — WORSHIP. 

The Greeks called man "anthropos," meaning the 
upward-looking one. "Man is the creature of 
religious instincts, and must worship something, " is 
the pronouncement of Kant. If dogmatism be suf- 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 117 



ferable anywhere, surely it is here, for man, wherever 
found, is a worshipful creature, capable of appreciating 
ing, capable of admiring, capable of extolling. That 
outburst of the soul, that rapture and rush of the 
emotions, that exclamation in the presence of the 
picturesque, that is the natural sentiment of worship. 
Education and study exalt it into a culture; revela- 
tion into a duty. 

This power of appreciation it is that elevates man 
and places him on the heights. That which lifts 
us above the savage is the capacity to admire, and 
the wider the range of one's admirations the higher the 
type of his manhood. He who can enthuse over a 
sweet song, a beautiful landscape, a perfect poem, a 
noble painting, a faultless statue, a clever mechanism, 
any perfect piece of art, he, we say, is an all rounded 
character. Turner, standing on the foothills watch- 
ing the sunset tinting the Matterhorn, bared his head, * 
bended his knee. He spake not, for voice were dumb, 
speech irreverent. He who can discover nothing in 
the gallery of beauty to kneel before, he who can find 
in the temple of wisdom nothing more to learn, he 
surely asks claim on our long suffering and pity. 

When Rubenstein was in this country some years 
ago, a friend took him to hear his pastor preach. 
Asked the following Sabbath if he cared to go again, 
Rubenstein replied: 

4 4 Yes, but you must take me to hear a man who % 
will tempt me to the impossible." 

Rubenstein felt the need of some excellence unat- 
tainable to tone up his jaded nature. Ideals we call 
them.. Ideals each true life must have. If there 
were no God, the human heart must make One, for 



n8 HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



where there is no vision of the Infinite, the people 
perish. Worship is a true soul-view of God; rather 
is it a soul-view of the true God. It is the highest 
admiration, because the admiration of the highest. 
Worship is worthship — a confession of worth. It is 
a reverential upward-look. It is the attitude of the 
penitent rising and turning his face skyward. Most 
truly does some one say that the evil of atheism is 
not its open avowal that there is no God, but rather 
its silent implication that nowhere in all this universe 
lives one greater, wiser, holier than itself. The evil 
of atheism is its monumental self-deification. 

During the past century Renan has been the 
acknowledged leader of the critical school in France. 
Perhaps he had as little innate reverence as any 
scholar of his time. His teaching at bottom is 
atheistic. In the preface to his " Recollections" he 
pens these words: 

"One of the most popular legends in Brittany is 
that relating to an imaginary town called Is, which 
is supposed to have been swallowed up by the sea at 
some unknown time. There are several places along 
the cost which are pointed out as the site of this 
imaginary city, and the fishermen have many strange 
tales to tell of it. According to them, the tips of the 
spires of the churches may be seen in the hollows of 
the waves when the sea is rough, while during a calm 
the music of the bells rises above the waters. I often 
fancy in my calmer moments that I have at the 
bottom of my heart a city of Is, with its bells calling 
me to devotion. At times I stop to listen to these 
gentle murmurings, which seem to come from hidden 
depths, like voices from another world.'! 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 119 



Truly a wondrous confession for the great French 
skeptic! Underneath the cynical thinking and prof- 
ligate life of this wonderful man. the voice of God 
was clamoring for homage. For praise and honor 
are claimed by Him who filleth all in all. 

Surely there is deep need in our land to-day for 
some embankment to stem the tide of our growing 
irreverence. In these days when veneration, like 
meditation, is becoming a lost art, what hope is there 
for America's rising youth if the tabernacle of prayer 
becomes empty of its penitent children? When 
humbling before the Most High is set at naught, 
when the awful holiness of Him we worship, when 
the voice of hosanna and the principles of eternal 
truth are no longer heard in prayer of song or sermon, 
whither then shall we be found tending? Is it pos- 
sible for a nation to become godless? That is, is it 
possible for a nation to lose its conception of the 
divine holiness? For a surety this is not a little 
matter. It is vital. Bound is it to tell in society's 
forward march. The church is the shrine of God- 
reverence. It asks the youth whose garments have 
been soiled, to fall forward into the dust and cry: 
" Unworthy, unclean!" Thus, by the grace and 
power of Christ, will he be lifted and rise up a worthier, 
a better man; "for he that exalteth himself shall be 
abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be ex- 
alted." 

III. HOLINESS. 

And holiness is the only pledge and hope of the 
future life, for the church is the perpetual memorial 
to that life. Godliness is to be the church's pole-star 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



till time shall be no more. One calls it the " human 
life of God," as that life was faultlessly enfleshed in 
Jesus. Righteousness, holiness, Godliness — this is to 
be our never- ageing message. The church stands for 
the most vital thing in life — the art of teaching men 
how to live. On creeds and articles the minds of 
men have always differed, and there is no sure evi- 
dence forthcoming that the future will not repeat the 
past ; but right and wrong are as old as Orion and its 
nebula. Right will never lose its lustre; never wrong 
its shame. Full oft and repeatedly we hear the 
criticism made that the church is narrow; but how r 
otherwise could she be? Is she not the only organi- 
zation in the world to-day that stands for unflinching 
antagonism to wrong? Her battle cry must ever be 
hostility, not victory. Victory is sure, but victory 
belongeth unto Him for whom are all things and by 
whom are all things. To us pertains the warfare, 
and " unconditional surrender" are the terms. "If 
the church were not," means that the supremacy of 
evil would be unchallenged, the field abandoned, and 
Satan have his own wicked swing. 

Thus far we have not entered on the disputable. 
So many are the immortal verities on which all minds 
agree, that life were over-brief to exhaust even these, 
and the world is slowly learning that, as the certain- 
ties are more than sufficient to fill life's hurrying 
hours, fighting and quarreling over things debatable 
is time-waste, sheer and simple. God and worship 
and right living are not problems controvertible. So 
how honest-hearted, fair-minded business men can 
remain stone-deaf to the Macedonian cry the church 
is uttering to-day, were passing strange and puzzling. 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 121 



Recently it was my fortune to spend a day with a 
great manufacturer of national note. Two thousand 
five hundred men has he in his employ. Relating the 
story of his strict, early training, he told me how he 
had been brought up on porridge and the shorter 
catechism. Dropping into a familiar mood, he said: 

"I haven't been to church for eleven years." 

Emboldened by his freedom, I ventured to inquire 
how he spent his Sabbaths. 

"Well," he answered, "I generally play a game of 
golf on Sabbath morning, sleep on Sabbath after- 
noon, glance over a magazine Sabbath evening, retir- 
ing not later than nine, and awaken to my work 
Monday morning, fresh as an athlete." 

Meanwhile this wealthy magnate, with his abound- 
ing influence, with two thousand five hundred work- 
ingmen watching his every movement, with five 
thousand children of these workingmen growing up 
around him to repeat his example, has deserted the 
faith of his fathers, left the village preacher and a 
few good women to teach these children in the Sab- 
bath school the commandments of safe and holy 
living, not dreaming that some day a strike may be 
forthcoming, when these very boys will rise up in 
their envy to burn his buildings, tear down his prop- 
erty, and threaten his life. For the church to-day is 
the only peace-pleading tribune between the rich and 
poor. Her mission is to heal wounds, to pour oil 
upon troubled waters, to proclaim the gospel of 
brotherhood and good will. When we see in our 
literature the widening spread of a revolutionary 
socialism ; when we mark how money is growing year 
by year to be the universal monarch of men ; when 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



we see how ease, which usually means disease, is 
eating into the body politic; when we watch realism 
wedging its way into the realm of fiction; when we 
note the slavery of social arrogance and the lustful 
heartlessness of corporate wealth; when we see the 
yawning gulf between the privileged and the lowly 
deepening each year, aye, and widening; when we 
study the drink curse, the gambling, the lust, the 
sins of a violent and vulgar nature, those of a soft 
and sinuous type; and then, when we remember that 
the church is confessedly the only intermediary, the 
only hope of our American society, the only healing 
ointment for her sores and bruises, the only antidote 
to her sins — the burden is laid heavily upon our hearts 
to ask how it is that patriotic, country-loving men 
can so easily emancipate themselves from the great 
Christian brotherhood and shirk its duties, its toil, its 
labor, its support. 

Some years ago Prof. Henry Rogers wrote a book 
which he called " The Eclipse of Faith." He dreamed 
that on a certain morning the world awoke to find 
that the Bible had been absolutely banished from it. 
Every copy of every Bible in every tongue had dis- 
appeared, and even the quotations from the Script- 
ures had become extinct. The very name and 
memory were lost. A striking conception it was, 
and leading to some startling conclusions. 

In fancy let us picture a like lament over the 
passing of the church. Every cathedral, church, 
chapel and cloister in this great land of ours razed 
level with the ground; 30,000 pulpits from Maine to 
Mexico hushed; the voice of the preacher no longer 
heard in the land; the words of Jesus forgotten; no 



COMMUNION OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 121 



longer a handful of men to lift up a little wooden 
cross between heaven and earth; no more any refuge 
for the weary and heavy-laden, the man bankrupt in 
hope, the woman bankrupt in love; no longer any 
listening to what the unchangeable God has to say 
concerning sin and pain and want and woe and pardon 
and peace. The world has lost its faith. 

Tennyson has drawn for us this picture in its 
startling outline. They are husband and wife. At 
length they make up their minds to drown them- 
selves, and you fancy you see them wading into the 
water as he says: 

u Lightly step over the sands ! The waters — you hear them call ! 
Life with its anguish, and horrors, and errors — away with it all V 
And she laid her hand in my own — she was always loyal and 
sweet — 

Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our 
feet. 

There was a strong sea-current would sweep us out to the 
main. 

Ah, God, though I felt as I spoke, I was taking the name in 
vain — 

Ah, God, and we turned to each other, we kissed, we em- 
braced, she and I, 

Knowing the love we were used to believe everlasting, would 
die: 

We had read their know-nothing books, and we lean'd to the 
darker side— 

Ah, God, should we find Him, perhaps, perhaps, if we died, if 
we died! 

We never had found Him on earth, this earth is a fatherless hell — 
Dear love, forever and ever, for ever and ever farewell ! 
Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began, 
Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man." 

The church has now entered upon a struggle for 
life. The coming revival is to be one of righteous- 



HEAVENLY HARMONIES. 



ness. Every consideration to-day that makes for 
the permanence of our institutions asks for the pros- 
perity and welfare of the church, and the refusal of 
men to come out boldly and lend it their support— to 
say the least — is ungenerous, and savors of selfish- 
ness "The rich and the poor meet together, the 
Lord is the Maker of them all." That is Christian 
socialism. No man can genuinely love his brother 
man until they have clasped hands and hearts around 
the Father's hearthstone. Europe is a standing wit- 
ness to that fact to-day; where the sanctuary of 
prayer is empty, there class hatred is found ferment- 
ing. 

Once it was my fortune to sail up New York harbor 
on a peaceful Sabbath morning. Far away the bells 
were tolling, and hard by old Trinity, with its slender 
spire shooting above the smoke, was calling the 
people to forget the noise and din and clatter of the 
counter and come apart into a quiet place to rest 
awhile. New York was summoning her tired chil- 
dren to the feet of that Father in whom we live and 
move and have our being. The great metropolis was 
calling her weary ones to worship, her erring ones to 
pardon, her fainting ones to rest and peace. 



15 cents each. The Colportage Library. Two for 25c. 



THE DEEPER CHRISTIAN 
LIEE. 

No. 98— Back to Bethel; or. Sep- 
aration from Sin and Fellowship with 
God. By F. B. Meyer. 
The author's preface says* "I trust 
these sermons will teach how the close- 
ness of our walk with God may be main- 
tained, so that there may not be the 
weary monotone of perpetual failure. We 
may be kept from the power of known 
sin, though always needing the blood of 
Christ." 

No. 96— Kept For the Master's 

Use. By Frances Ridley Havergal. 
This book is a classic on the full con- 
secration of the believer. 

No. 91— Short Talks by D. L. 

Moody. 

No. 89— How to Pray. By R. 

A. Torrey. 

No. 86 — Moody's Latest Ser= 
moos. 

No. 81— Thoughts for the Quiet 

Hour. Edited by D. I,. Moody. 
Daily selections lor a year, embracing a 
verse of Scripture and devotional com- 
ment thereon. 

No. 77— The True Estimate of 

Life. By G. Campbell Morgan. 
Addresses that made a profound im- 
pression when delivered at Northfield, 
including "To Me to Iyive is Christ," 
"Redeeming the Time," etc. 

No. 73— The School of Obedi- 
ence. By Andrew Murray. 
"This beautifully written and deeply 
spiritual book we would most heartily 
commend to all Christian workers ancl 
Bible students, and especially for the in- 
struction and strengthening of young 
men and women, on whose obedience and 
devotion so much depends for the church 
and the world." — Footsteps of Truth. 

No. 71— Hen of the Bible. By D. 

L. Moody. 

Chapters on Abraham's Four Surren- 
ders; The Call of Moses, Nehemiah, etc. 

"Expressed in Mr. Moody's effective 
style."— The Christian Evangelist. 

No. 70— The Power of Pentecost. 

By Rev. Thomas Waugh. With a 
chapter on "The Filling of the Holy 
Spirit," by F. B. Meyer. 

No. 63- Meet for the Master's 

Use. By F. B. Meyer. 
"Stirring and inspiring. Mr. Meyer's 
preaching is characterized by directness, 



by simplicity, by plainness and by that 
strange power of finding the conscience 
which is one of the truest tests of preach- 
ing."— Sunday School Times. 

No. 54— Absolute Surrender, by 

Andrew Murray. 
•'To earnest Christian people seeking a 
more satisfactory experience and great- 
er conformity to the voice and heart of 
Christ, this book will be as a guiding 
star of hope."— Christian Work. 

No. 53— Select Northfield Ser- 
mons. By Moore, Webb-Peploe, Mc- 
Kenzie, Bonar, Gordon, Speer, Cuy- 
ler, etc. 

"One sermon, 4 The Religion of Un- 
spottedness,' is worth the price of- the 
book.' —Christian Courier. 

No. 52— Heaven on Earth. By 

A. C. Dixon. 

No. 51— A Castaway, and other 

Addresses, delivered by F. B. Meyer. 
"I believe that what is here taught will 
give a glimpse into those deeper aspects 
of Christianity which are best adapted to 
nourish and quicken the inner life." — F. 
B. Meyer in the preface. 

No. 49— The Spirit-Filled Life. 

By John MacNeil. 

No. 44— The Overcoming Life, 

and other sermons. By D. I,, Moody. 
"While Mr. Moody is a John the Bap- 
tist, calling men to repent, he is also a 
Peter, preaching new Pentecosts, and 
leading men to fuller consecration." — 
S. S. Times. 

No. 40— Kadesh=Barnea, or the 

Power of a Surrendered Life. By J. 
Wilbur Chapman. 
"Maps out the way of the life of full 
spiritual blessing." 

No. 32— The Secret of Guidance. 

By F. B. Meyer. 

No. 15— Light on Life's Duties. 

By F. B. Meyer, with an introduction 
by J. Wilbur Chapman. 
"Full of good things, and suitable for 
distribution."— Christian Observer. 

No. 14— Select Poems. 

"Thirty-one gems of religious verse." — 
Northwestern Christian Advocate. 

"A selection in which rare discrimin- 
ation and thorough knowledge of devo- 
tional verse are evinced. "— Young Men'* 
Era. 

No. 10— According to Promise; 

or, The Lord's Method of dealing with 
His chosen people. By C. H. Spur- 
geoa. 



i$ cents each. The Colportage Library. Two for age. 



FOR ENQUIRERS AND THE UNCONVERTED. 



No. 104— Up From Sin. By Len 

G. Broughton, M. D. 
The fall and rise of a prodigal is por- 
trayed, until he reaches the Blessed End. 

No. 93— The Pilgrim's Progress. 

By John Bunyan. 
This book has probably led more peo- 
ple to Christ than any other volume ex- 
cept the Bible. It never grows old. 

No. 92— The Great Appeal. By 

President James G. K. McClure. 
The appeal of the Gospel to the in- 
tellect, heart, conscience, memory, im- 
agination, self-interest and will. A good 
book for thoughtful young men. 

No. 88— The Atonement. A sym- 
posium, containing chapters by lead- 
ers in the Christian church on this 
fundamental doctrine. 

No. 68— The Mirage of Life. By 

W. Haig Miller. Fully illustrated by 
Tenniel. 

It is a portrait gallery of famous char- 
acters who have figured in various walks 
of life and missed its great end, deceived 
by the mirage. 

No. 60— Weighed and Wanting. 

Addresses on the Ten Command- 
ments, by D. I,. Moody. 
"Especially notable for the best char- 
acteristics of the evangelist's style. His 
force and fire and power appear even on 
the printed page."— Evangelical. 

No. 58— Naaman the Syrian, by 

A. B. Mackay. Introduction by D. £. 
Moody. 

The history of Naaman the Syrian, as 
recorded in 2 Kings, is the groundwork 
of this interesting and helpful book, 
showing how he came to know God. 

No. 56— Faith. Chapters by Spur- 

geon, Finlayson, Aitken, Maclaren, 
Moody and others on different phases 
of this topic. 

No. 48— The Prodigal. Chapters 

by Spurgeon, Aitken and others. 
Founded on the parable of the Prodi- 
gal Son. 

No. 30— Good News. By Robert 

Boyd. 

"It will perhaps lend interest to the 
reading of this book to know that D. L. 
Moody got his first definite ideas of gos- 
pel truths from its contents."— Extract 
from Preface. 

No. 26— Sowing and Reaping. 

By D. I,. Moody. 

On the text— "Be not deceived, God is 



not mocked, for whatsoever man sow- 
eth, that shall he also reap." (Gal. 
vi. 7.) 

No. 21— Select Sermons. By D. 

I,. Moody. Sermons entitled: "Where 
Art Thou?" There is no difference; 
Good News;* Christ seeking sinners; 
Sinners seeking Christ; "What think 
ye of Christ?" Excuses (two parts.) 
"With the effect of these addresses, 
when spoken, the whole land is acquaint- 
ed, and now that they are printed, they 
will tend to keep in force the impression 
they have already made." — Methodist. 

No. 20— Sovereign Grace. Its 

source, its nature, and its effects. By 

D. L. Moody. 
"Particularly useful as showing the 
part which the grace of God takes in the 
work of conversion and regeneration."— 
Preacher's Analyst. 

No. 19— Good Tidings, by Tal- 

mage, Spurgeon, Parker, McNeill. 
"Behold, I bring you Good Tidings of 
great joy, which shall be to all peo- 
ple; for unto you is born this day — a 
Saviour." (Luke ii. 11, 12.) 

No. 7— The Way of Life, marked 

out by Spurgeon, Chapman, McNeill, 
Moody, Talmage. 
"These discourses are eminently prac- 
tical, clear and Spiritual, and can scarce- 
ly fail to guide the honest inquirer in 
'The Way of Life.' The Peninsula 
Methodist. 

No. 4— Life, Warfare and Vic- 
tory. By D. W. Whittle. Life im- 
parted by God through faith in Jesus 
Christ; warfare with enemies, within 
and without; victory "through Him 
that loved us." 
"Of immense service to those seeking 
after truth or who have just embraced the 
Gospel of Christ. "—Baptist Messenger. 

No. 2— The Way to God, and 

How to Find It. By D. I,. Moody. 

Chapters to meet the special needs of 

different classes of inquirers, and for 

backsliders. 
"Full of pathos, point and power. Can- 
not fail to be the means of quickening 
and blessing wherever read." — The Meth- 
odist. 

No. 1— All of Grace. By C, H. 

Spurgeon. An earnest word with 
those who are seeking salvation by 
the I,ord Jesus Christ. 



15 cents each The Colportage Library. Two for 25c 



PURPOSEFUL STORIES 
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. 

EACH IXI,USTRATKD. 



No. 94— Christie, The King's 

Servant. By Mrs. O. F. Walton. 
A sequel to Christie's Old Organ (see 
No. 57, below), and by many considered 
superior to the earlier story. 

No. 93 — The Pilgrim's Progress, 

By John Bunyan. 
The Colportage edition of this classic 
will be a favorite because of its exact 
text and the suggestive pictures of char- 
acters and scenes with which it is splen- 
didly illustrated. 

No. 90— Little King Davie. By 

Nellie Hellis. 
A touching story of I,ondon life. 

No. 87 — A nissionary Penny. 

By I,. C. W. 

No. 78— The Robbers' Cave. By 

A. I,. O. K. 
A story of stirring interest for young 
people. The scene is laid in Italy. 

No. 72 — A Peep Behind the 

Scenes. By Mrs. O. F. Walton. A 
story. 

"I have just finished reading A Peep 
Behind the Scenes. It will add greatly 
to our list of books. It is one of the best 
things against the theatre that can be 
brought out, and will do much good."— 
D. L. Moody. 

No. 68— The riirage of Life. By 

W. Haig Miller. 
A portrait gallery of famous characters 
who have figured in various walks of life 
and missed its great end, deceived by the 
mirage. 

No. 65— Alone in London. By 

Hesba Stretton. 

No. 61— The Crew of the Dol- 
phin. By Hesba Stretton. A story of 
the sea. 

"The book is graphic, and has a strong 
Christian tone."— The Congregationalist m 

No. 57— Christie's Old Organi 

By Mrs O. F. Walton. 
"A splendid book to leave in homes 
where tracts would be refused." — Church 
Calendar. 

No. 50 — Jessica. A story in two 
parts— "Jessica's First Prayer" and 



••Jessica's Mother." By Hesba Stret- 
ton. 

This work is a classic, and has already 
had a sale aggregating about two millions. 

No. 42— Whiter than Snow, and 

Little Dot. Stories. 

No. 38— Parables from Nature. 

By Mrs. Alfred Gatty. 
"A very interesting book, in which 
religious truths are taught by various 
members of the inanimate world. ' ' — Cum~ 

berland Presbyterian. 

No. 28 — Probable Sons. By 

Amy I^e Feuvre. 

"Among the brightest, most charming 
and irresistible of child creations in our 
recent literature." — The Independent. 

"I could wish this little story might 
have a million readers, as it has proved a 
means of grace to my own heart." — 
Thomas Spurgeon. 

No. 23— Nobody Loves Me. By 

Mrs. O. F. Walton. 
"A touching story of the way in which 
a hardened and loveless life was led into 
true light and love."— The Union Signal. 

SERMONS FOR THE 
YOUNG. 

No. 75— Tales of Adventure from 

the Old Book. By Thomas Champ- 
ness. 

Mr. Champness' graphic and practical 
style lends new interest to the Bible in- 
cidents he deals with. 

No. 55— Possibilities. By J. G. 

K. McClure. 

No. 36— Sunday Talks to the 

Young. By Josiah Mee. 
This book embodies a happy thought. 
Thirty-one excellent short talks on most 
important themes. 

No. 12 — Gospel Pictures and 

Story Sermons for children. By D. 
W. Whittle. Major Whittle's object 
sermons for children, teaching by the 
eye as well as by the ear. The topics 
are— The Poison Sermon— The Mag- 
net Sermon— The Candle Sermon — 
The Commandments Sermon (two 
parts)— The Heart Sermon. Pro- 
fusely illustrated. 
"Simple, attractive, instructive; and 
may prove suggestive to all pastors wish- 
ing to present, in a forceful way, import- 
ant truths to young minds."— The 
/Standard. 



15 cents each The Colportage Library. Two ior 25c* 



FOR MOTHERS. 

No. 82— Mothers of the Bible. 

By Charles I^each. 
"Simple, briet and spiritually percep- 
tive. There is much pathos, much of 
the warm human life-beat that draws." 
— Baptist Union. 

No. 74— Home Duties. By R. T. 

Cross. 

Duties of Husbands, Wives, Parents, 
Children, Brothers, Sisters; Duty of Fam- 
ily Worship, Method of Family Worship; 
Duty of Getting a Home, and How to Get 
It. 

BIOGRAPHIES FOR CHIL- 
DREN. 

No. 79— The Life of David. Large 

type, profusely illustrated. 

No. 69— Children of the Bible. 

Chapters on the childhood of Isaac 
and Ishmael, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, 
David, Jesus, Timothy and others. 
Large print, copiously illustrated. 
"Ought to be welcomed by the children 
of thousands of homes. No better stories 
were ever told, and in the present handy 
volume they are again well told."— Chris- 
tian Guardian. 

No. 18— The Good Shepherd, a 

life of our Saviour for children. I*arge 
print, profusely illustrated. 

ANECDOTAL AND SUGGES- 
TIVE. 

No. 81 -Thoughts for the Quiet 

Hour. Edited by D. I,. Moody. 

No. 80— John Ploughman's Pic= 

tures. By C. H. Spurgeon. A com- 
panion volume to the famous John 
Ploughman's Talks. (See No. 62, 
below.) 

"Spurgeon's homely philosophy and 
familiar illustrations are too well known 
to need comment."— Christian Standard. 

No. 76 — Moody's Stories. A 

second volume of anecdotes, incidents 
and illustrations selected from the 
addresses of D. I,. Moody. (See No. 66.) 

No. 66 — Moody's Anecdotes. 

Anecdotes, incidents and illustrations 
from the addresses of D. X,. Moody. 
"There does not appear to be a point- 
less story included, and most of them are 
keen as a Damascus blade."— Sunday 
School Times, 



No. 62— John Ploughman's Talk, 

or, Plain Advice for Plain People. By 

C. H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon's most 
popular book: over half a million 
copies sold. 

Deals in simple language with every- 
day faults and virtues, warning and in- 
struction being clothed in Spurgeon's 
inimitable wit and humor. 

No. 22— Temperance. 

"A perfect magazine of anecdotes, ex- 
periences, facts and arguments, helpful 
alike to general reader or public" 
speaker."— The Baptist Union. 

No. 17— Selections from Spur- 

<geon. Characteristic selections from 
Mr. Spurgeon's sermons, revealing 
the secret of his mighty power as a 
preacher. 

"Covers a wide variety of spiritual top- 
ics in the great preacher's inimitable 
way."— The Golden Bute. 

No. 16— Point and Purpose in 

Story and Saying. 

"Full of pithy anecdote and illustration, 
of exceptional value to clergy and lay- 
men."— Young Men's Era. 

FOR CHRISTIAN 
WORKERS. 

No. 85— The Revival of a Dead 

Church. By I,en G. Broughton, M. D. 

Nos. 83=84— The Shorter Life of 

D. L. rioody. By his son, Paul 
Dwight Moody, and A. P. Fitt. In 
two volumes, containing photos and 
other illustrations. 

"Necessarily brief, it presents its sub- 
ject in clear, strong outline, and gives a 
vivid, graphic picture of that unique and 
wonderful life and personality. "--Evan- 
gelical. 

No. 77— The True Estimate of 

Life. By G. Campbell Morgan. 
Addresses that made a profound im- 
pression when delivered at Northfield, 
including "To Me to I^ive is Christ," 
"Redeeming the Time," etc. 

No. 59— The Lost Crown. By J. 

Wilbur Chapman. 
"Calculated to stir Christians to a care- 
ful discharge of duty." 

No. 9— To the Workl A trumpet 

call to Christians, by D. I,. Moody. 
Chapters on Hindrances, the Motive 
Power for Service, Faith, Courage, 
Enthusiasm, etc. 



■5 cents each. The Colportage Library. Two for 25c. 



ON THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

No. 98— Back to Bethel. By F. 

B. Meyer. 

Containing reports of addresses given 
during his recent American tour. 

No. 91— Short Talks, by D. L. 

Moody. 

Contains (among others) chapters on 
the Gift of Power, and on Emblems of 
the Holy Spirit— Fire, Water. Rain and 
Dew, Wind, Seal, Dove, Oil. 

No. 85— The Revival of a Dead 

Church. ByLenG. Broughton, M.D. 

No. 70— The Power of Pente- 
cost. By Thomas Waugh, with a 
chapter on "The Filling of the Holy 
Spirit," by F. B. Meyer. 

No. 54— Absolute Surrender. By 

Andrew Murray. 

No. 51— A Castaway. By F. B. 

Meyer. 

No. 49-The Spirit-Filled Life. 

By John MacNeil. 
"I wish to urge all, especially ministers 
of the Gospel, to give this little book a 

Erayerful reading. I feel confident it will 
ring them help and blessing. It will 
deepen the conviction of the great need 
and absolute duty of being filled with the 
Spirit. It will point out the hindrances 
and open up the way. It will stir up 
faith and hope." — From Rev. Andrew 
Murray's Introduction, 

No. 32— The Secret of Guidance. 

By F. B. Meyer. 

No. 8— Secret Power; or The Se- 
cret of Success in Christian I^ife and 
Christian Work. By D. L Moody. 
Power— its source; 'in' and 'upon'; in 
witnessing; in operation; hindered. 

ON PRAYER. 

No. 89— How to Pray. By R. A. 

Torrey. 

No. 81— Thoughts for the Quiet 

Hour. Edited by D. I,. Moody. 
"In this age of rush and activity we 
need some special call to go apart and 
be alone with God for a part of each day. " 
D. L. Moody in Preface. 

No. 6— Prevailing Prayer; What 

hinders it? By D. I,. Moody. Chap- 
ters on Adoration, Confession, Resti- 



tution, Thanksgiving, Forgiveness, 
Unity, Faith, Petition, Submission — 
nine elements that are essential to 
true prayer. Additional chapters on 
the prayers of the Bible and answered 
prayers. 

"It is most searching and powerful in 
its appeals to the conscience, and abounds 
in well- told incidents."— Lay Preacher. 

ON CHRIST'S RETURN. 

No. 95— What is Maranatha? By 

G. W. Gillings. 

A tactful approach to the study of 
this important subject, in the form of a 
dialogue. 

No. 34— The Second Coming of 

Christ. Chapters by D. I,. Moody, 
Bishop J. C. Ryle, George Muller, 
Major Whittle, C. H. Spurgeon and 
others. 

"Good fuel to feed the flame of that 
'blessed hope' in the breast of every be- 
liever."— The Evangelical. 

HELPS IN BIBLE STUDY. 

No. 101— The Ten Command- 
ments. By G. Campbell Morgan. 

No. 81— Thoughts for the Quiet 

Hour. Edited by D. I,. Moody. 
A verse of Scripture opened up for 
every day in the year. 

No. 64— Our Bible. Is My Bible 

True? and Where Did We get It? By 

Charles Leach; andTen Reasons Why 
I Believe the Bible is the Word of 
God. By R. A. Torrey. 
"A book that believers in the authority 
and authenticity of the Bible ought to 
possess. The core of the case has been 
presented in a way that cannot but pro- 
duce the most favorable impression."— 
Western Christian Advocate. 

No. 60— Weighed and Wanting. 

By D. J^. Moody. 
Chapters on each of the Ten Com- 
mandments. 

No. 15— Light on Life's Duties. 

By F. B. Meyer. 
Contains a chapter on How to Read 
Your Bible. 

No. 3— Pleasure and Profit in 

Bible Study. By D. I,. Moody. 
"Here are sixteen chapters containing 
the very best things Mr. Moody has ever 
said about the best of books. It is full of 
suggestions, "—The Central Baptist. 



NOV 14 1901 



OCT 28 mi 



THE MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE 

OF CHICAGO 

was founded by D. I,. Moody in 1889 for the training of men 
and women in the knowledge and use of the English Bible 
and in methods of Christian work. 

It depends for support upon the voluntary contributions 
of Christian friends. 

HOW YOU CAN HELP 

I. Substitute plan— Many men and women of comfortable 
means are not able, on account of family, health or qualifications, to 
give themselves to the Lord's work. They desire, therefore, to send 
substitutes in their stead — thus turning their money into flesh and blood. 

An opportunity for the exercise of such Christian benevolence is 
afforded by founding Scholarships. The value of each is only 
$150.00 per annum, or a lump sum of $3,000.00 for investment. 

One hundred and fifty dollars will cover the average annual expense 
of the tuition and training of one student. 

If this notice should catch the eye of some friend who wants to per- 
petuate his good works by the perpetual training of laborers for the 
Master's vineyard, let him send check or communicate with A. P. Fitt, 
Secretary, 80 Institute Place, Chicago. 

II. Annual membership — A large share of support comes from 
Annual Members, that is, friends who are elected by the Board of 
Managers, and who also pay $5.00 or upwards as a donation; such 
membership to continue during the calendar year in which the contri- 
bution is accepted. 

We need all the help we can get to extend the work, and any sum 
will be acceptable. 

All members are entitled to receive copies of The Institute Tie, 
the Secretary's Annual Report and other such reports free. 

gilrWrite for particulars of a better plan than leaving money 
by will, by which you can be your own executor and retain 
the full income for life. 

Checks should be made payable to E> G. Keith, Treasurer, and 
addressed to 80 Institute Place, Chicago. 

Applicants for admission should write to the Superintendent, Men's 
Department, 80 Institute Place, Chicago; Women's Department, 230 
La Salle Avenue, Chicago. 



LIFE, WORDS AND WORK OF 

D. L MOODY 



Twenty uniform volumes, 5x7 inches, 
paper covers, 2560 pages, embracing 
sermons, anecdotes and an authen- 
tic biography* 

AUTHORIZED EDITIONS. 

$2.00 for the set; J5 cents separately; two for 
25 cents* Postage paid to any address in 
the world. 




Over 
Three nilUon 

Copies 
Issued in All. 



The Shorter Life of D. L. MOODY 

By PAUL DWIGHT MOODY AND A. P. FITT 

Vol. I.— His Life. Vol. II. —His Work. Eighteen full-page halftone and other 
illustrations. Prepared in co-operation with the family 
and personal friends. 



MOODY'S LATEST SERMONS 
WEIGHED AND WANTING 

Addresses on each of the Ten 
Commandments. 

MEN OF THE BIBLE 

Abraham, Moses, Naaman, Ne- 
hemiah, Herod and John the Bap- 
tist, the Man Born Blind and 
Joseph of Arimathea, The Peni- 
tent Thief. 

BIBLE CHARACTERS 

Daniel, Enoch, Lot, Jacob and 
John the Baptist. 

SELECT SERMONS 

Containing * k Excuses, 1 
sermon preached by D. 
on earth. 

MOODY'S ANECDOTES 

Anecdotes, incidents, 
tions, largely personal. 

MOODY'S STORIES 

A second volume of anecdotes, 
incidents and illustrations. 

THE OVERCOMING LIFE 

And other sermons. 

THE WAY TO GOD 

And How to Find It. 

In cloth covers, 30 cents each t net. 



* the last 
. L. Moody 



illustra- 



THOUGHTS FOR THE QUIET 
HOUR 

Daily selections for a year, edited 
by D. L. Moody. 

SHORT TALKS 

PLEASURE AND PROFIT IN 

BIBLE STUDY 

"Sixteen chapters containing the 
very best things Mr. Moody has 
ever said about the best of books. " 
— The C entral Baptist. 

SOWING AND REAPING 

HEAVEN 

Where is it; Its inhabitants; How 

to get there. 

TO THE WORK! 

A trumpet call to Christians. 

SOVEREIGN GRACE 

Its source, its nature and its ef- 
fects. 

PREVAILING PRAYER 

What hinders it? 

SECRET POWER 

or, The Secret of Success in 
Christian Life and Work. 

{Except the Shorter Life.) 



AGENTS WANTED IN 
EVERY COMMUNITY. 
Previous experience not 
essential. Liberal profit. 



Make drafts and money orders payable to A. F. 
GAYLORD, Treas. All orders should be ad- 
dressed to A. P. FITT, SUPT., 250 La Salle 
Avenue, Chicago; or East Northfield, Mass. 



